
Class 



Book »-C.sf* 



Copyright W. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



1 



TIHE BOOKLOVERS READING 
CLUB HAND-BOOK TO AC- 
COMPANY THE READING COURSE 
ENTITLED, CHILD STUDT FOR 
MOTHERS AND TEACHERS 




SEYMOUR EATON 

Librarian 

FREDERIC W. SPEIRS, Ph.D. 

Educational Director 



(?) 



THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS. 

Two Cocico HecfcivEO 

NOV. 1 1901 

Copyright entry 

<7-e* a _ iqoi 

CLASS CtXXc. No. 

/ % lp~) tr- 
COPY J. 



Copyright, 1901 
The Booklovers Library 



CHILD S T U DY 

for MOTHERS and TEACHERS 



Course. Fill: Booklovers Reading Club 



BOOKS SELECTED 

FOR THIS READING COURSE 
by 

MARGARET E. SANGSTER 



*J 







(9) 



IV 



V 






\ 



i 



<\\s 



f 




The BOOKS 



E following four books are supplied by 
The Booklovers Library to Club Members 
who have enrolled for Course VIII. 



/. A STUDY OF CHILD NATURE 

(Elizabeth Harrison) 

//. THE STUDY OF THE CHILD 

(A. R. Taylor) 



///. BECKONINGS FROM LITTLE HANDS 

(Patterson DuBois) 



IV. THE POINT OF CONTACT IN 
TEACHING 

(Patterson DuBois) 



The course of reading as outlined in this hand-book 
is based on these books. A supplementary list of books 
will be found at the end ■ 



(") 



Child Study for Mothers and Teachers 

TALKS and LECTURES 

by 

NORA ARCHIBALD SMITH 

and 

EMILIE POULSSON 

and 

KATE GANNETT WELLS 

and 

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN 

and 

LUCY WHEELOCK 

These papers by Miss Smith, Miss Poulsson, Mrs. 

Wells, Mrs. Gilman and Miss Wheelock 

have been prepared especially for 

readers of this course. 



EDITORIAL NOTES 

by 
CHARLOTTE BREWSTER JORDAN 

(■3) 




A WORD from THE DIRECTOR 



N the construction of this course we 
have observed most carefully the precise 
purpose expressed by the title. We 
might have asked the occupant of a 
university chair of psychology to select 
the books for us. If we had planned 
a professional course we should have 
done so. But this is a course for mothers 
and teachers, and we asked Mrs. Sangster to 
recommend a list of books for us because we felt 
that she would be able to take the view point of 
the readers whom we had i?i mind. 




OS) 



A Word from the Director 

Child study literature has been pouring from 
the presses during the last decade. The school of 
psychologists best represented by Clark University 
has produced an abundant technical literature. 
In sharp contrast with the coldly scientific analyses of 
the psychologists, we have had a flood of sentimental 
productions which are valueless, if not positively 
demoralizing. But, happily, there is a rapidly 
growing body of literature which presents sound 
psychological principles in such form that they may 
be grasped by those who have had no technical 
training in psychology. From this class of books 
we have made our choice. 

In the contributors of the papers we have a 
strong representation of the kindergarten element. 
Miss Nora Archibald Smith was a pioneer worker 
in the free kindergarten movement of the West 
and has written 7?iuch on the subject. Miss Lucy 
Wheelock is the prificipal of one of the largest 
kindergarten framing schools in the country. Miss 
Emilie Poulsson is the editor of the Kindergarten 
Review. 

The other two papers of our course give us 
views of the subject of child study from somewhat 
different standpoints. Mrs. Kate Gannett Wells 
has long been identified with general educational 
administration and has devoted special attention 

(16) 



A Word from the Director 

to Sunday-school methods. Mrs. Charlotte Per- 
kins Gilman has no connection with any educa- 
tional system, either as teacher or administrator. 
She has a wide reputation as a frank and fear- 
less critic of various social institutions, and when 
she expressed her theory of the proper training of 
the child in her recent book, Concerning Chil- 
dren, her views attracted much attention. What- 
ever she writes arouses interest and stimulates 
thought, and her non-professional discussion of the 
purpose and method of child study is a valuable 
supplement to the papers of those who are engaged 
in teaching and in the management of schools. 

We present this course to the public with the 
assurance that it will promote intelligent observa- 
tion of children and assist mothers and teachers 
in solving many perplexing problems of the home 
and the schoolroom. 



07) 



Teaching is enabling another to restate the 
truth in terms of his own life. — Patterson Du Bois. 



The Idea of the Course 




(URING the last twenty-five years much 
has been written, wise and otherwise, 
upon the all-important subject of child 
study. In the main, however, the re- 
sults of such study have been highly 
serviceable, leading in most cases from 
" uncertain instinct into unhesitating 
insight." Careful observation and sys- 
tematic experiment have rendered such 
convincing results that in many homes and schools 
there has been a complete readjustment of 
method. 

Realizing that no substitute could ever be 
found for the inventiveness of mother-wit, or for 
the tenderness of mother-love, modern method 
aims to adapt rather than to displace established 
ideas. Its purpose is not to revolutionize but to 
individualize ; not to judge childhood from the 
adult standpoint, but from that of the individual 
child. Judging themselves by the more recent 
methods of child study, parents and teachers 
have awakened to find that all too frequently 
adult egotism, not of juvenile depravity, is respon- 
sible for a wayward childhood ; that children often 
suffer as much from unreasonable demands as from 
neglect ; that moral delinquency in many instances 
is traceable to defective physique ; and that the 



(19) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

health and strength of maturity are largely de- 
pendent upon the untrammeled expansion of 
childhood. 

Froebel's sympathetic power of divination gave 
the first impetus to this study, and his child-lov- 
ing constituency has carried on the good work in 
a humanitarian and scientific spirit, gathering 
wisdom which is rich in promise for the child of 
the future. Froebel did not expect his theories 
to receive general endorsement for two hundred 
years ; yet in little more than a half-century his 
principles have been impressed upon a rapidly 
increasing number of students who are striving, 
in consequence, to think themselves into the 
mental attitude of the child. 

In preparing a child study course for parents 
and teachers, it has been our aim to avoid the 
fragmentary and the hyper-ecstatic and to present, 
as far as possible, the most practically useful 
principles in popular form. The books which we 
furnish cover the fundamental principles and at 
the same time are rich in suggestion. The earn- 
est study of this subject richly repays the effort. 
Through the child, the man is uplifted ; through 
the man, the race. Who, therefore, helps a little 
child in its struggle toward the Infinite, by that 
much advances all humanity. 



(20) 




HINTS AND SUGGESTIONS TO 
THE READER 



I 



~)i order to get the best results from this course of 
Child Study, give the books a hasty, general 
first reading in the following order, making men- 
tal or written notes of helpful paragraphs or of 
points needing special, thoughtful attention. 

First read A Study of Child Nature (from the 
kindergarten standpoint) by Elizabeth Harrison. 
The author's psychical knowledge of children's 
needs is here communicated in such a friendly, 
logical spirit, her illustrations are so practical and 
forcible, and her deductions are so obvious that 
the reader mounts two or three rounds of the 
ladder of child study by a mere appreciative fol- 
lowing in the author's footsteps. 

Next read Beckonings from Little Hands, a 
book originally written for private circulation, but 
so strongly recommended by Miss Elizabeth Har- 
rison for use in mothers' clubs that it has become 
a regular publication. Since Miss Harrison intro- 
duced it to the general public it is but fitting that 



(21) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

this book should succeed her own in our course 
of reading. Its intimate personal tone will place 
you at once in sympathetic touch with child nature, 
for it reaches always beyond the intellect and 
touches the heart, thus supplementing, yet in a 
measure modifying, the ultra-scientific spirit char- 
acterizing certain phases of child study. 

You are now ready for Taylor's The Study of 
the Child. This book gives rather more promi- 
nence to the teacher's share in child education 
than do the other books. Dr. Taylor's scientific 
study of the child from the child's standpoint clearly 
shows the trend of the pedagogical revolution 
which has been gathering force during the last 
thirty years. The importance of sound physical 
development is strongly emphasized, and the 
numerous practical tests scattered throughout the 
book contribute largely to its general helpfulness 
and suggestiveness. Dr. Harris' preface is a 
valuable contribution regarding the place of sym- 
bolism in child study. 

In The Point of Contact in Teaching, the scientific 
method which has been adopted in general 
teaching is applied with a peculiarly original force 
to the long neglected subject of Sunday-school 
teaching. Although this book had its beginnings 
in the special line of Sunday-school work, its basic 
principle " that in the child's instruction we must 
begin at his point of contact with objective or ex- 

(22) 



A Course in Child Study 

ternal life as he sees it" is one of universal value 
applicable to all the relations of life. 

Having gained a rough working outline of the 
general plan of the course, give all the books a 
second careful reading with special reference to 
the topics suggested in the topical outline. 

Many general topics, such as the unappreciated 
struggles of childhood, the potency of the " love- 
force," the various ways in which well-told stories 
appeal through the imagination to the child's 
highest instincts, have been so interwoven with 
other subjects in the books that it has sometimes 
been impossible to detach and utilize them as 
main topics. The student will nevertheless find 
it interesting to trace their course and work out 
his own conclusions therefrom. 

Parallel the illustrations given in the book with 
those of daily occurrence in your home or school. 
Consider the remedies suggested ; if they are not 
practicable, where lies the fault — with the general 
principle, with your personal viewpoint or with the 
former injudicious training of the child? 

Since this course is simply suggestive, many 
special phases of this study may be successfully 
carried on beyond the limits of the course by 
means of the supplementary reading suggested 
in this handbook. Take, for instance, the sub- 
ject of punishment. Although Miss Harrison's 

(23) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

logical suggestions, supplemented by Dr. Taylor's 
valuable hints, cover a large part of the ground, 
there is still some interesting territory to traverse. 
The book which heads our bibliography, Gentle 
Measures in the Training of the Young, by Jacob 
Abbott, is a singularly helpful contribution to this 
difficult subject. Abundant in illustration, simple 
and direct in style, it makes a convincing plea for 
the full establishment of authority through per- 
sistently gentle measures. Many of the remedies 
suggested are as ingenious as they are practical. 
This book also contains a chapter, which will well 
repay careful study, upon the natural causes of 
restlessness and its wise treatment. 

In some instances excellent authorities will be 
found to differ regarding the solution of certain 
mooted questions. Just here the individuality of 
the student must assert itself, and the test of 
what he has gleaned from the course will lie in 
his increased ability to adapt that knowledge to 
the personal peculiarities, the environment and 
the rate of development of the child for whom 
the course is studied. 

Review by the test questions on pages 1 14 and 
115. As far as possible write out the answers to 
these and to the sub-questions which will naturally 
present themselves. The effort to give verbal ex- 
pression to newly acquired impressions will be 
found to act as a powerful fixative. 



(H) 



TOPICAL OUTLINE 

F THE COURSE 



1. The Place to Begin. From the parent's 
standpoint. From the child's standpoint. The 
child's point of contact with physical life ; with in- 
tellectual life. The child's plane of experience in 
general and religious teaching. 

The Study of the Child, xlii-6. 

The Point of Contact in Teaching. 3-45 ; 55-69 ; 

123-127. 

2. The Training of the Senses. The instinct 

of investigation. Significance of sense defect. 
Value of full sense development in the arts and 
sciences. Moral, practical and intellectual value 
of sense training. 

The Study of the Child. 1-59. 

A Study of Child Nature. 33-60. 

3. The Bridge from the Physical to the 

Mental. How sensations come into conscious- 
ness. Consciousness and apperception. The child's 
adjustment to widening experience. Progress from 
the individual to the class, and development of the 
sense of relationship. 

The Study of the Child. 60-68. 

4. Symbolism. Educational value. Relation to 
imitation. Universalizing power. Symbolism 
makes language possible. 

Preface to The Study of the Child, v-xiv ; 76-92. 
The Point of Contact in Teaching. 95-99. 

(25) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 
Memoranda : 



(26) 



A Course in Child Study 



5. The Training of the Muscles. The in- 
stinct of activity. The treatment of restlessness. 
Kinds of movement best adapted to younger 
children. Relation of sensory and motor nerves. 
Muscular control and the nervous system. 

The Study of the Child. 93-105. 
A Study of Child Nature. 13-32. 

6. The Training of the Affections. The 

instinct of love, to be tested by its effect upon the 
will. Child service. Self sacrifice. Relation of 
emotional nature and physical organism. The in- 
stinct of reverence more essential in the very 
earliest period than dogmatic or specific teaching. 
Reaction of bodily attitude upon inward feeling. 

A Study of Child Nature. 29; 75-89; 164-182. 

The Study of the Child. 1 1 1-1 14. 

7. The Training of the Will. The instinct 

of recognition. Voluntary and forced obedience. 
Intellectual control economizes time and energy. 
Reactive effect of the various kinds of control 
upon the character of the child. 

The Study of the Child. 1 15-123. 

A Study of Child Nature. 136-163. 

8. The Training of the Reason. Instinct 

of continuity. The physical side of reasoning 
and other mental activities. The development 
and cultivation of judgment. The effect of logical 
play in the kindergarten. 

A Study of Child Nature. 90-1 12. 

The Study of the Child. 137-150. 

(27) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



Memoranda 



(28) 



A Course in Child Study 



9. The Training of the Faith. The instinct 

of imitation and its reaction upon character. Be- 
ginnings of religious training. Force of example. 
All-importance of the unseen side of life. 

A Study of Child Nature. 183-207. 

The Point of Contact in Teaching. 3-18; 122- 131. 

10. Manners and Morals. Origin of the moral 

instinct. The relation of the social to the moral 
instinct. Distinction between politeness and mere 
good manners. When the moral character appears. 
Three elements in moral culture : right knowing, 
right loving and right doing. Simple rules for 
development of right motives. 

The Study of the Child. 168-178. 

1 1 . Positive and Negative Methods of 

Training. Depressing influences to be avoided. 
Suggestive illustrations of the advantages of posi- 
tive methods of training. The spirit of investiga- 
tion versus the destructive spirit. 
A Study of Child Nature. 18-31. 

12. Educative Value of Play. Children should 

be taught how to play. Play as related to the 
child's social life and future occupations. Indi- 
vidual and general play. Toys. 

The Study of the Child. 162-167. 

A Study of Child Nature. 64-74. 

13. Stories. Their educative value. Why they 
should be optimistic. Pointing the moral. 

A Study of Child Nature. 1 49- 152. 
Point of Contact. 1 20- 1 22. 

(29) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



Memoranda : 



(30) 



A Course in Child Study 

14. Habit-Forming and Habit-Breaking. 

Education and habit. Habit and character. 
The Study of the Child. 1 53-1 58. 
A Study of Child Nature. 17-22. 

15. Right and Wrong Punishments. The 

child's inborn instinct of justice. Acceptance of 
inevitable consequences of wrong-doing. The 
office of punishment. Retributive rather than 
arbitrary punishment. 

The Study of the Child. 197, 198. 

A Study of Child Nature. 1 1 2- 1 3 5 . 

16. Self-Conquest, the True Conquest. The 

victory of struggle. Self-government. 

Beckonings from Little Hands. 19-28; 73-88. . 
A Study of Child Nature. 163. 

17. The Force of Sympathy. The test of the 

true teacher. Working upon the sympathies of 
the child. 

The Study of the Child. 206-207. 

A Study of Child Nature. 77-79. 

Beckonings from Little Hands. 3-16. 

18. Parent and Teacher. Synonymous use of 
terms. The child as the teacher's teacher. Parents' 
and teachers' clubs. 

Point of Contact. 130, 131. 
Beckonings from Little Hands. 97-98. 
A Study of Child Nature. 108. 
The Study of the Child. 209. 

(30 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



Memoranda : 



(32) 



A Course in Child Study 



19. Normals and Abnormals. Precocious and 
defective children. Relation of physical and 
mental defectives to moral defectives. Belated 
development in children. 

The Study of the Child. 179-194. 

20. The Fatigue Point in Children. Causes 

and remedies. Improperly arranged school pro- 
grams frequently responsible for childish ex- 
haustion. 

The Study of the Child. 199-202. 

21. Stages of Growth. Unconscious and sub- 
conscious influences affecting the child. Transi- 
tion from infancy to childhood, from childhood to 
youth. Corresponding changes in ideals. 

The Study of the Child. 195-199. 



3o (33) 



Many think they have all the knowledge of child- 
hood they require, from memory of their own childish 
years. This is wrong. Mental and moral growth 
necessarily i?ivolves increasing oblivion of every- 
thing of childhood save mere i?icidents. — G. Stanley 
Hall. 



THE STUDY OF 

CHILDREN: Some 

Suggestions by nora a. smith 



(35) 



" And in the interest of the children I have still 
another request to make — that you would record in 
writing the most important facts about each separate 
child. It seems to me most necessary for the compre- 
hension and for the true treatment of child nature , 
that such observations should be made public from 
time to time, in order that children may become 
better and better understood in their manifestations, 
and may be more rightly treated; and that true 
care and observation of unsophisticated childhood 
may ever increase!' — Frederick Froebel. 



THE STUDY OF 
CHILDREN: Some 

Suggestions by nora a. smith 

Miss Nora Archibald Smith, a native of Phila- 
delphia, early removed to California where she 
was graduated from the Santa Barbara College, 
afterwards taking various degrees for kinder- 
garten training. For a few years she traveled in 
Mexico and Arizona, and her experiences at that 
time are reflected in Under the Cactus Flag, one of 
her recent stories. Her educational work went 
hand-in-hand with that of her only sister, Kate 
Douglas Wiggin, who organized the first free 
kindergartens for poor children on the Pacific 
coast. This line of philanthropic effort Miss 
Smith continued for some years as superin- 
tendent of the Silver Street kindergartens in San 
Francisco, finding time also for literary effort in 
the same direction. Her studies and stories com- 
prise : The Children of the Future, The Kinder- 
garten in a Nut Shell and The Message of 
Froebel. In collaboration with Mrs. Wiggin she 
has written The Story Hour, The Republic of 
Childhood, in three volumes ; Children' s Rights 
and several other kindergarten works. Miss 
Smith now resides in Maine and contributes 
frequently to periodicals. 

On the thirtieth of January, 1841, Froebel wrote 
the letter from which is taken the extract 
printed on the opposite page ; and his scheme of 
infant education as developed in the kindergarten 
is evidence of his own preeminent care and obser- 
vation of unsophisticated childhood. On the 
twenty-first day of April, 1901, it may safely be 

(37) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

said that at least one group of babies in every 
town of this country, from Maine to California, 
celebrated the birthday of the "discoverer of 
childhood," for this opening year of the twentieth 
century sees two hundred thousand children 
attending kindergartens in the United States of 
America alone. 

There is now not a country on the globe and 
there are very few islands of the sea where the 
kindergarten is not known ; and that a system of 
infant education based upon the study of chil- 
dren should have traveled so rapidly around the 
world in the fifty years since the death of its 
founder is proof sufficient of how true was the 
insight that developed it. 

Although Froebel is frequently called the father 
of child study and although his writings are con- 
ceded to be among the most valuable of its docu- 
ments, yet his work so far antedates others in the 
same field that the new science was not even 
named or considered as a special branch of inves- 
tigation in his day. The work of Prof. Wilhelm 
Preyer in Germany gave the special impetus to 
the modern movement in this line and the publi- 
cation of his wonderful book, The Mind of the 
Child ( 1 88 1), may be said to have marked the 
first milestone in its progress. Scientific observa- 
tions of children began in this country in 1880, 
and so much is it the instinct of our people, as 
has been said, " to take a fresh and independent 

(38) 



A Course in Child Study 

look at primal facts of human nature and at 
growth itself" that we may safely say that more 
has already been accomplished here than in any 
other land. 

Courses in child study are now given either in 
the regular work or in the summer sessions of 
most American colleges and universities. Spe- 
cialists are preparing themselves in this country 
and in Europe, hoping to become professors of 
paidology, another name for the new science. 
The program of no educational meeting is 
complete without a paper or a series of papers 
on the subject ; one magazine is wholly devoted 
to its interests, special departments being con- 
ducted in other periodicals ; and the number of 
books dealing with the recently discovered branch 
of knowledge is already very considerable. 

And what does this mean, — this widespread 
interest in the study of the little people, this out- 
pouring of literature on the subject, this eager 
desire to observe and record every manifestation 
of child nature, no matter how minute or appar- 
ently unimportant ? It means, in the first place, 
that thoughtful people have come to the conclu- 
sion that the modes of training and preparing for 
life, the methods of education which are in ordi- 
nary use in this and other countries, are lacking 
in some vital points ; that the failures which they 
make are frequently due to inherent defects in 
the systems ; that these systems are not based 

(39) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

upon a sufficiently intimate knowledge of child 
nature, and that of all living beings the child is 
least known and has been least studied. 

To realize that a thing is imperfect is the pre- 
liminary step toward making it right ; and as this 
is the children's century and America preemi- 
nently the children's country, we can scarcely be 
surprised that so encouraging a beginning has 
now been made in the task of redressing the 
wrongs of our coming men and women. 

It is customary to speak of paidology, "the 
great sociological and humanitarian study," as 
Dr. Stanley Hall calls it, as a new science. This 
paper, indeed, has so alluded to it, but this after 
all is a mistake, for Adam and Eve must have 
taken it up, or at least sketched a preface for it, 
when they began the education of little Cain and 
Abel. That the methods of training which they 
based upon their observations did not succeed 
with all their offspring is true enough, but the 
same thing might be said of many modern parents 
with far greater advantages than those of the 
Edenites. Even ignorant, inexperienced Eve, all 
unversed as she was in the mysterious ways of 
children, must often have remarked the striking 
dissimilarity in the temper and characteristics of 
her first two sons, and Adam must have had fre- 
quent cause to be grateful that, in his case at 
least, the sorely tried mother could not bewail, 
in time of nursery outbreak, the unfortunate dis- 

(40) 



A Course in Child Study 

position which her poor little Cain inherited 
from his father's people. 

In just as different guise as Cain and Abel 
appeared to their astonished parents when the 
world was young do modern children reveal 
themselves today, and the problems of train- 
ing in family and school resolve themselves 
into : first, an earnest effort to become acquainted 
with the personality of the young human being ; 
and second, to draw forth all its powers and by 
wise guidance to fit it for life. Every parent, every 
teacher, is to some degree a paidologist, but the 
work of both classes of persons up to late years has 
been more or less empirical. Both the intelligent 
mother and the enthusiastic teacher, thoroughly 
devoted to their respective charges, have in all 
times had a pretty thorough knowledge of them, 
but the knowledge was fragmentary ; it came in 
bits, as it were, and could seldom be massed or 
viewed as a whole. It was unconscious knowl- 
edge in a way, and as such was hardly in a state 
to be acted upon — a knowledge of facts, not 
reasons; of results, not causes. The purpose of 
the present movement is an intelligent effort on 
the part of persons entrusted with the responsi- 
bility of children to gain a thorough systematic 
knowledge of them from the beginning of their 
days, and so to record the observations made that 
they may form a guide for the training and 
education not only of the particular child in 

(41) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

question, but for other little ones whom no one 
has time or interest to study. To prove that this 
is possible, one of the most noted American 
observers of children, Milicent Washburn Shinn, 
has lately said that in many things all babies are 
alike, since babyhood is mainly taken up with the 
development of the large, general social powers, 
individual differences being less important than 
in later childhood. 

Thus if, as Froebel advised, the most important 
items about each separate child are recorded in 
writing and made public from time to time, a foun- 
dation is laid for that body of carefully observed 
facts which Dr. Joseph Le Conte declares to be 
of transcendent importance for the new science. 
Many mothers already keep note-books in regard 
to their children and many have done so in 
the past ; but as the work has commonly been 
felt to be of personal interest, rather than of 
possible scientific value, the observations were 
seldom made regularly or recorded systemati- 
cally, and unless system and order are present, 
no observations can be relied upon in any line of 
research. 

Professor Sully doubts whether the mother's 
mind can be severe enough in its insistence on 
plain ungarnished fact, or sufficiently trained in 
minute and accurate observation and in sober, 
methodical interpretation for such a task. "The 
very excellences of maternity," he says, " seem, 

(42) 



A Course in Child Study 

in a measure, to be an obstacle to a rigorous 
scientific scrutiny of babyhood." But the con- 
tributions of women to the new science will 
generally have nothing to do with "interpreta- 
tion"; it will rather be the careful, painstaking 
amassing of facts in regard to the child's growth 
and physical, mental and moral development. 
Cannot an intelligent woman be trusted to note 
such facts as well as the advent of a new planet 
when it swims into our ken, or the careful 
scrutiny of the characteristics which determine 
a new species of plants ? And women have 
become eminent astronomers and botanists ere 
now. "Love the child," say the greatest obser- 
vers, "and he will reveal himself to you," and if 
success depends chiefly upon love, the other gifts 
will be added unto it. 

"And what shall we observe?" say the women 
who are interested in the subject and whose great- 
est delight in life is to watch the development of 
their children. In the first place, in order to gain 
an idea of the charms of the work and of the 
fascinating way in which it may be treated, it 
would be well to read Miss Shinn's Biography of 
a Baby, which records her observations on her 
niece during the first year of the baby's life. 

Beginning by noting the first infantile move- 
ments, such as stretching, yawning, swallowing, 
crying, etc., which merely belong to the class 
called reflex, and mostly come ready-made at the 

(43) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

baby's birth, the first definitely conscious impres- 
sions are observed when hearing becomes a real- 
ized fact and the child's world of vision emerges 
from confused " patches of light and dark with bits 
of glitter and motion" to the actual seeing of things 
about it. The development of taste and touch 
is minutely noted, likewise the development of 
mental qualities, such as memory, dawning affec- 
tion, curiosity, voluntary locomotion and self-con- 
sciousness. 

Attaining the age of nine months, the baby 
has likes and dislikes ; she begins to enjoy life 
and take keen interest in all about her ; outdoors 
her happiness is even greater than the month 
before, and her cries of rapture, as she looks 
up, down and around, and realizes her own ac- 
tivity in the midst of all the waving and shiny 
and blooming things, are remarkable, uttered as 
they are from the very deeps of her little soul, with 
that impassioned straining of the central muscles 
by which a baby throws such abandon of longing 
or ecstasy into its voice. 

During the next three months great progress 
is noted in the practicing of the powers the in- 
fant has just acquired, and so the story of the 
swift, beautiful year is ended, and one wee soft, 
helpless baby has become this darling thing be- 
ginning to toddle, beginning to talk, full of a 
wide-awake intelligence and rejoicing in her mind 
and body. 

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A Course in Child Study 

The observations, as will be seen, cover the 
development of sensation and consciousness, of 
emotion and intelligence, of sight and hearing 
and speech, of voluntary motion and much be- 
sides ; but few women are sufficiently trained in 
psychology to make such extensive inquiries. 

Although we may take this delightful book as 
an ideal, both in scientific scope and literary treat- 
ment, of what a baby biography may be, most of 
us will have to content ourselves with a less am- 
bitious series of notes, and for this purpose an 
invaluable guide is Mrs. Adler's Hints for the 
Scientific Observation and Study of Children, which 
contains a detailed plan for the keeping of a jour- 
nal and suggestions as to the first points to ob- 
serve, as the development of senses, will, mind, 
language, judgment, reasoning, etc. Mrs. Hall's 
The First Five Hundred Days of a Child's Life 
is also an admirable guide for those who do not 
wish to be too technical, and so are Mrs. Jack- 
man's Outlines for Child Study. 

The possible value to science of a great mass 
of careful observations of children is evident 
enough when we consider that very little is known, 
for instance, concerning the unfolding of the 
child's faculties, while only a few exact notes are 
on record of the development of language, and 
still less material is at hand concerning the growth 
of the moral perceptions, of conscience and the 
feelings, and of the sense of personality. If the 

(45) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

mother can trust herself to be careful, systematic, 
impartial and absolutely veracious she can collect 
material which will be of great value to the scien- 
tist, but even if it never reach the eye of this 
great personage, or be a twice-told tale when it 
does reach him, the labor meantime will have been 
of inestimable value to herself. It will have 
given her an understanding of the inner life of 
her child, a knowledge of his temperament and 
peculiar characteristics, an insight into his possi- 
bilities for good and evil, which many mothers fail 
to gain in the course of their whole experience ; 
for it is a mistake to suppose that we always 
understand by intuition even those who are of 
our own flesh and blood. More than this, she 
will have developed herself mentally and morally 
in making these long-continued observations and 
will have become by so much the better guide for 
her child in all methods of training and education. 
Nor can her influence end here, for what she 
knows of one small human creature she can 
apply, if such work comes within her sphere of 
influence, to the deserted little ones, the found- 
lings and orphans, the defective and abnormal 
children with whom the institutions of the State 
are crowded. 

From the objections to child study which are 
sometimes advanced one would suppose that it 
was necessary to impale a child on a pin like a 
butterfly, in order to observe him properly, or to 

(46) 



A Course in Child Study 

fumble about his works with a sharp instrument, 
as a watchmaker does with a timepiece that is out 
of order. No view of the matter could be more 
mistaken, for the moment the subject becomes 
conscious that he is being observed that moment 
the observations become valueless. He must be 
absolutely free and unconstrained, his actions and 
the movements of his mind spontaneous, else the 
notes we make of his behavior will be useless. If 
he has even the glimmering of an idea that he is 
being watched he naturally becomes either shy 
and secretive, or boastful, self-assertive and 
anxious to impress us with his knowledge and 
accomplishments. This is true of the older child, 
conscious of his own personality, not of the in- 
fant, of course; but in either case all that is 
required is a more or less steady oversight during 
certain periods of the day and the direction of 
attention along certain lines. A child — any child 
— is so interesting a creature in himself that he 
is commonly the centre of attraction wherever he 
may be ; and we shall do him far less harm by 
watching what he does of his own volition than 
by teaching him tricks which he may show off, on 
occasion, like a performing poodle. The mother 
who invites a playfellow to spend an hour with 
her boy and then sits quietly at the window, 
attentive to all that goes on, yet apparently 
absorbed in her work, may thus gain an insight 
into his temper, a glimpse of his dominant 

(47) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

characteristics and of the faults that are likely to 
beset him, which will illumine, as by a flashlight, 
that vague sketch of his personality which has 
hitherto hung but half-seen on the walls of her 
mind. A record of many such hours spent in 
oversight of work and play will reveal to the 
parents the character in embryo as it really is, 
and will suggest with some degree of certainty the 
pruning which will be necessary here, the cultiva- 
tion there, and perhaps even the line of life for 
which the child will be best fitted in the future. 

Leaving generalities and turning to particulars, 
there are many observations upon the little one's 
physical condition which the parent may make 
with great advantage. As there is a certain 
weight and height, a girth of chest, hips and 
thigh, a breadth of shoulders, etc., which belong 
by right to every child of a given age and nation- 
ality, so any great deviation from this standard 
may be noted by measurement and the cause for 
the defect ascertained and removed if possible. 
The sight and hearing are also to be tested with 
regularity, for often these are, or become, 
seriously impaired while the parent is in complete 
ignorance of the fact. Tragic results may follow 
upon this ignorance. Witness a child of whom 
the writer knew who was long punished for wilful 
disobedience, finally pronounced feeble-minded 
and placed in a retreat, only to have it discovered 
just before his death that his sight and hearing 

(48) 



A Course in Child Study 

were so defective that he had never in all his 
brief and wretched life seen any object in the 
world as it really is, or clearly heard any com- 
mand or suggestion given to him. His brain 
was found to be quite normal, and a surgical 
operation would have removed all his defects had 
his parents ever taken the trouble to find them 
out. 

Special care must of course be given to the 
child at the period when his growth is most rapid 
and when he is most vulnerable to disease, and 
here repeated and careful observations as to sleep 
and appetite are necessary. "The modern child," 
as a wise mother lately said, "growing up 
amid the excitements of city life, needs to have 
extraordinary intelligence and care manifested in 
his management if he is to possess that physical 
balance and nervous poise essential to normal 
intellectual development. Common sense — un- 
educated common sense — is not infallibly quick 
to interpret the signs of brain fag and nerve 
strain displayed in a child's postures and expres- 
sions. Therefore the careful mother will study 
her children, watching for the bewildered frown, 
the nervous twitch of the face muscles, the peev- 
ishness which should warn her that life is getting 
to be too much for them. Nor will a careful 
mother fail to appreciate the strain upon the body 
involved in the change from home life to school 
life. She will realize that more nourishing diet, 

4« (49) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

longer periods of rest and exercise, will be 
needed to make up for the fresh demand upon 
nervous energy." 

Constant oversight, too, is requisite lest the child 
be forced by school competition or his parents' 
exactions to attempt more than he is really able 
to perform. It must be recognized that fatigue 
varies with the condition of the mind and body. 
Thus one tires sooner when the work is distaste- 
ful or when the organs are unhealthy or when the 
body is poorly nourished ; also, the body is wearied 
more quickly when the mind is tired and the mind 
more quickly when the body is fatigued. The 
child tires more easily at some seasons than at 
others. The condition of the atmosphere, the 
weather and the time of day — all these affect the 
normal power of endurance. Also, the rapidly 
growing human creature fatigues readily. What 
is learned is soon lost when a child is in this con- 
dition, the mind's forces being easily dissipated 
under such circumstances. The work done today 
is done on to morrow's credit and the system is 
wholly at a loss to protect itself against disease 
and accident. Continual overpressure in child- 
hood undoubtedly means weakened possibilities 
in adult life. 

The working of "sums," when long continued 
and a source of anxiety to the pupil whose pro- 
motion is perhaps in question, has often brought 
on chorea, and worry over " practicing " and the 

(50) 



A Course in Child Study 

gentle art of music in general has been known 
to produce the same effect. It is clear enough 
that no parent would see a nervous disease fasten 
upon his child if he could avert it, and yet in 
many cases he fails to do so because for one 
reason or another he has never observed him 
sufficiently to know his real condition. Do you 
remember the unfortunate little radish, on Charles 
Kingsley's Isle of the Tomtoddies, whose parents 
constantly beat it for sullenness and obstinacy 
and wilful stupidity, and never knew that the 
reason why it could not learn or hardly even 
speak was that there was a great worm inside it 
eating out all its brains ? 

If observing the child and recording the obser- 
vations are begun as soon after birth as possible, 
the parent will have much of value to communi- 
cate to the teacher when school life begins. In 
a certain school in Illinois a few years ago, a 
regular course in child study was instituted 
through the medium of the family. The parents 
were asked in detail by the teachers when the 
little ones were brought to them about the 
general physical condition of the children, when 
they began to walk and to talk, what illnesses 
they had undergone, to what weaknesses or 
physical defects they were subject, whether they 
slept and ate well, took outdoor exercise, etc. 
As to their general knowledge and mental ten- 
dencies, it was inquired whether they had 

(50 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

traveled at all, whether they were inquisitive, 
whether they were familiar with any language 
besides English, whether they had memorized 
any songs or poems, what were their dispositions 
and affections, their favorite games and stories, 
their interest in animals, their environment and 
experiences, their ability to get on with their 
playmates, etc., etc. 

The taxpayer who prides himself upon his 
hard common sense will undoubtedly object, as 
he reads the foregoing paragraphs, that such an 
examination into each child's physical, mental 
and moral condition would consume the entire 
first week of the school session. Very possibly 
it would, it may be answered, but the question to 
be considered is rather how many weeks it would 
save in the end. The teacher who knows noth- 
ing about the pupil entrusted to her care save 
his name and age is like a traveler set down in 
an unknown country without map, guide or com- 
pass and condemned to stumble along, forever 
returning upon his own steps until by chance he 
hits upon a main-traveled road, and journeys 
somewhere, if not indeed to the wished-for goal. 
All would applaud the traveler's wisdom if he 
exhausted every effort to find a guide before con- 
ducting himself through unknown regions, and 
the teacher's case is precisely similar. The Illi- 
nois teachers to whom reference has been made 
found the efficiency of their work greatly increased 

(52) 



A Course in Child Study 

by their knowledge of their pupils, and the par- 
ents, discovering in many cases that they were 
unable to give satisfactory answers to the ques- 
tions asked of them, were incited to fresh obser- 
vation of their offspring. The following blank 
was finally filled out by the teacher in regard to 
each pupil, and one may see that, though the 
notes may not be absolutely correct in regard to 
each separate point, yet the whole supplies a fair 
working knowledge of the case in question. 

Date. Name. Age. 

Physical Notes. 

Height Weight 

Right or left handed 

Chest measure] ^ngs full 

S Lungs empty 

Color 



I^oior 
Visual distance { Ri ^ ht 
I Left , 



Color 



Hair- 

*■ Texture 

Indications of tubercular affections 

Habit of sitting 

" " standing 

Deformities 

Peculiar habits 



Mental Notes. 

Power of attention .... 
" " observation . . . 
" " memory .... 
" " imagination . . . 

" " reason 

" " judgment .... 

" " volition 

f Self-control . 
<■ Perseverance 



(53) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



Power of oral expression 

Courage, expressed how 

Pride 

Temper 

Temperament in general 

Affections {Epistic 

<- Altruistic 

Originality in thought 

Rapidity of thought 

Carefulness 

Motive in school work 

Purity of mind 

(Place other remarks on back of this card.) 



Teacher. 



As we study the growing human being more 
carefully and know him better in home and school 
we shall treat him with more thorough justice, and 
there is no question that a want of justice is some- 
thing of which he may frequently complain. As 
a school superintendent said the other day, it is 
often as cruel to correct a child for laziness or 
sullenness as to reprimand a patient for being ill. 
The whole matter of punishment needs special 
observation and attention. We punish a child for 
lying when, as Sully says, he is only making his 
first poetry ; we punish him for disobedience when 
he cannot distinctly hear our commands, and for 
carelessness in stumbling over objects and letting 
them drop when he can see nothing clearly. He 
falls under the ban for running away from home 
and yet there is nothing there to interest him, and 
for playing with children whose society is for- 

(54) 



A Course in Child Study 

bidden, when he is given no pet and has not one 
live thing to keep him company. When he fails 
in his lessons he is frequently set longer tasks and 
kept from play to study; although his poor brains, 
like those of another Tomtoddy vegetable, are 
already turning to water under the strain ; and 
as he grows older he is continually being fitted 
into round holes by people who have never taken 
note of his lines and angles. 

Truly the ways of these " little candidates for 
immortality," as Oliver Wendell Holmes loved to 
call them, are not always ways of pleasantness 
nor their paths, paths of peace ; nor can they be 
so until a clearer vision of the real nature of 
the child has disclosed to us his true needs and 
possibilities. 

The physical, intellectual and spiritual powers 
of the human being are so closely interwoven, 
acting and re-acting upon each other continually, 
that we cannot guide the child's development 
rationally without knowing something of his 
individual endowment in all three directions. 
This knowledge is only to be gained by intel- 
ligent observation, reflection and study. 




(55) 



Children should have their times of being off 
duty, like soldiers, and when o?ice the habit of obe- 
dience if required is certain, the little creature 
should be very early put for periods of practice in 
complete command of itself, set on the bare-backed 
horse of its own will and left to break it by its own 
strength.— John Ruskin. 



Methods and Means of 
Studying Children: A 

Talk by LUCY WHEELOCK 



(57) 



Methods and Means of 
Studying Children: A 

Talk by LUCY WHEELOCK 



Miss Lucy Wheelock is known to the world of 
letters through her stories and poems for children 
which have appeared from time to time in the 
magazines, and through Red Letter Stories and 
Swiss Stories for Children and Those Who Love 
Children (1885-87), translated from the German 
of Johanna Spyri. She has, by lectures in the 
larger cities of the United States and her connec- 
tion with summer schools, devoted many years to 
childhood and its needs and interests. Miss 
Wheelock was for three years president of the 
International Kindergarten Union, and has been 
since 1889 at the head of a large kindergarten 
training school in Boston, which sends its gradu- 
ates to all parts of America. 

*\7 ' ommt lasst uns tmsern Kindern leben" was 
JlV the motto of Froebel, the great prophet of 
the modern child study movement. His method 
of making acquaintance with the life of child- 
hood was neither by the keeping of a life book 
nor an album nor yet by the compilation of rec- 
ords of observation of particular activities and 
tendencies in children. His was the more in- 
timate method of companionship. 

"A foolish old man" he was denominated by 
the practical people of the village, as they saw 
him walking through the streets followed by a 

(59) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

troop of children, clinging to him wherever a tiny 
hand could get hold. Utter foolishness to them 
were the plays organized and directed by the 
friendly old man when he had conducted his flock 
to the green slope of a protecting hill. With the 
affection of a father bestowed upon the children of 
others and with the almost motherly intuition of a 
heart loving childhood for its own sake, added to 
the insight of a philosopher, the great German 
teacher proclaimed his gospel of salvation for 
humanity through right means of child nurture 
and the elevation of the ideal of family life. 

His mission was to give to mothers and teachers 
practical guidance in ways and means of employ- 
ing and directing to their proper ends the activi- 
ties of children. His secret, he said, was caught 
from mothers and is to be learned by the divining 
heart. His method was to live with the children 
whom he would know, joining as a friendly com- 
panion in the sports and plays which are the true 
revealers of child life. 

"The thoughtful mother," whom he presents 
in his book of Mother Play, is first pictured sit- 
ting by the bank of a stream, observing her chil- 
dren at play. One is an active boy watching the 
water wheel he has placed in the brook. Another 
is a thoughtful lad peering into the clear depths 
of water and wondering over what he sees. A 
third, a practical lassie, is wading into the water 
eager to stir up something. Last is a shrinking 

(6c) 



A Course in Child Study 

child clinging close to mother. Diverse in temper- 
ament, differing widely in tendencies, how are they 
to be guided and trained so as to reveal the best 
in each ? This is the problem set by Froebel for 
mothers and teachers. The book itself is a prac- 
tical answer to the question. 

Froebel's mother takes care of her own chil- 
dren. She shares in the joy of their first discovery 
of the kinship of "friends in feathers and fur." 
With them she visits garden and stream to watch 
the green, growing things, and to enjoy the dart- 
ing, shimmering play of the fish, and to make 
friends with chickens and pigeons. She does not 
disturb with paltry explanations the childish 
wonder over the silvery moon, sailing on high, 
and the stars which light the dark, for out of this 
wonder reverence is born. She may not always 
accompany her children on their excursions ; but 
she is ready to weave together the incidents of 
the day into the bed-time story and thereby stamp 
impressions and give continuity to experience. 
She sings the song or suggests the play to fit the 
occasion and strengthen the lesson it teaches. 
She opens the gates into the mysterious post- 
roads over which the rolling wagons seem to go 
out to the end of the world, and rejoices in the 
flight of the bird into the infinite. She paints 
the human world as one of blessing and goodness 
where everyone may play a happy part. The 
carpenter builds the friendly house that shelters 

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The Booklovers Reading Club 

you and me ; the farmer gives us daily bread ; 
the coal-man on his cart may have black hands 
but his heart is kind and his work noble because 
necessary. 

" For where should we get a knife, spoon or fork, 
If the honest coal-digger were not at his work ? " 

It is her privilege to foster the spirit of true 
worship, as did the mother of Carlyle, by setting 
up in that holy of holies — a child's heart — the 
altar of loving trust and reverence. Her little 
ones see the loftiest whom they know on earth 
bowed down before the loftier in Heaven, and 
for them the busy day closes in peace. This is 
Froebel's picture of a mother living with her 
children. 

"I live for my children," says the anxious 
hard-working mother, busy with elaborate gowns 
and coats, suitable for the season, and no worse 
than her neighbor's. She has little time to make 
herself the friend and confidante of her boys and 
girls, and later, with a constant heartache, knows 
that she has lost them. " It is all for my chil- 
dren " is the excuse of the father, too much 
occupied with business to make even the acquaint- 
ance of his family. One could almost envy Harry 
Richmond the possession of a father, impossible, 
to be sure, in worldly ways, but able to make 
himself into a menagerie of noble and spirited 
animals, and to so vivify the history of kings and 

(62) 



A Course in Child Study 

queens as to make them inspiring friends, and to 
introduce the wild, courageous Will Shakespeare 
as a boon companion — not an altogether admirable 
parent ; but who would not choose such a father 
rather than a Feveril with a system warranted 
perfect in itself; but not warranted to fit? 

There are children in the world whom we seek 
to know en masse. There is the child, that 
abstract nonentity to whom all ready-made 
systems owe their origin. Then there is a child, 
shy, variable, incomprehensible, eluding all our 
systems, our notebook and our records. Who 
is wise enough to know this "wild child-heart," 
to lure it from the dark of its own individual con- 
sciousness ? Without knowledge who is able to 
guide it into fulness of life ? 

There was a mother of old, who watched her 
boy as he grew daily in wisdom and stature and 
favor with God and man. As she watched him, 
she kept all these things and pondered them in 
her heart. Her child's life book was in her heart. 
Her record was kept there and she pondered 
it. This is the only secret of child study for 
parent and teacher — to keep in the heart all the 
sayings and doings of a child one loves. " Warm 
it by your own heart " is Froebel's advice to those 
who would use his book of child and mother lore. 
But this is not all. 

Community of interest must always lead to 
cooperation. One may understand one's own 

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The Booklovers Reading Club 

child better by knowing how another has been 
trained. A true mother sees her own child in 
every child. "To communicate, forget not" is a 
good scriptural injunction. The woman's club 
has been an important influence in widening the 
interests and enlarging the life of woman ; but 
more important than the literary club or the 
travelers' circle or the science class is the mothers' 
round table or, better still, the parents' associa- 
tion, where the problems of child nurture are 
earnestly discussed. Such associations should 
constitute a part of the social life of every com- 
munity, and should make available to all the 
constantly increasing literature of child study. 
Mr. Will Monroe has compiled a bibliography 
of the subject, showing already a long list of 
books, pamphlets and periodicals. The list may 
be indefinitely extended by the books, good for 
us all, which give true pictures of child life and so 
help revive childish memories and make one a 
child again, even for one night. 

" He is best able to guide childhood who can 
most easily follow back the thread of life to child- 
hood," says Froebel. To remember what made 
us laugh and what made us cry, to recall the 
message whispered long ago by birds and flowers, 
to feel again the thrill of the half-sad ecstasy of 
the sighing wind among the trees, or the joy of 
dancing rain drops on the sidewalk is to enter on 
the borders of the land of childhood. There 



(64) 



A Course in Child Study' 

are a few fathers and mothers and rare grand- 
fathers who like Gladstone are able to retain the 
love of sports and the feeling of play which make 
a happy companion anywhere. 

To those hardened by the cares of the world 
and the deceitfulness of riches, no better boon 
can be given than the child whose demand for 
love and sympathy is like the warming sun of 
spring to the ice-bound earth. It is well for a 
busy man or woman to read occasionally such 
books as Silas Marner, Mrs. Burnett's One I 
Knew the Best of All, or Pierre Loti's Romance 
of a Child, of which an English translation has 
recently appeared. Such reading will change the 
weights of the balance for a little while and some- 
times readjust one's view of the world. 

A teacher who is only a part of a system bound 
to the uniform standard of promotion by which 
all pupils alike must be measured, whether quick 
or dull of wit, weak or robust in body, needs 
especially the baptism of spirit that comes from 
forgetting that the children are her pupils and 
trying to know them as living things. She needs 
to live with children by playing their games and 
thinking their thoughts. She needs to get the 
poet's view of childhood that holds the ideal 
above the drudgery of the real. 

No doubt she should be more scientific. Let 
her learn what experts are doing in psycho- 
logical laboratories, if she is able. Let her study 

5g (65) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

to know the physical defects and mental limita- 
tions of her pupils. Let her be quick to detect 
signs of fatigue and to avoid the cause. Let her 
provide for bodily comfort, as far as she is re- 
sponsible, by attention to seating and matters of 
hygiene. Let her watch for nascent periods of 
development of function that she may always 
know what to do and when to do it. Let her — 
oh, wonderful woman — be as wise as Minerva and 
far wiser ; but let her not neglect the weightier 
matters of the law which commands love as its 
own fulfilling. 

For both mothers and teachers the question of 
moral and religious training is an all important 
one. In the Puritan household, children were 
taught morals and religion by the Westminster 
Catechism, Scripture texts, and Sunday school 
lessons. Poor RicharcCs Almanac was as good 
as any other textbook of morals. A few excel- 
lent proverbs were current, such as u Example is 
better than precept," and "As the twig is bent the 
tree is inclined," but it is reserved for the mod- 
ern study of imitation, suggestion and habit to 
estimate the force of unconscious influence in 
building character and awakening ideals. Here 
again we are indebted to the psychologists, no- 
tably Professors Royce, Baldwin and James, for 
blazing out a path along which the ordinary way- 
farer may travel. 

" My mother says so," is usually a child's con- 

(66) 



A Course in Child Study 

elusive argument, but after all what really deter- 
mines a child's view of any situation is what he 
divines mother to be in spite of what she says. 
The family standards of life will ordinarily fall as 
a heritage to the children. These are learned, not 
by the precepts or texts taught, but by the ordinary 
conversation heard by wide-awake listeners and 
the business transactions witnessed by eyes eager 
to learn what the world is like. 

A timely utterance is that of Mr. Henderson in 
the Kindergarten Review for June, 1901, on 
Juvenile Traders. In this article Mr. Henderson 
speaks strongly of the trade spirit which is 
fostered in children, teaching the child to make 
his own way in the world, saturating him with 
the spirit of commercialism. 

One of the most interesting monographs of the 
child study literature is The Study of the Reli- 
gious Life of California Children, by Earl Barnes. 
This gives the account of a somewhat extended 
examination of school children in California to 
ascertain their religious concepts and beliefs. It 
suggests the ineffectiveness of current methods 
to convey appropriate religious ideas and the great 
gap between instruction and religion. 

One of the most sympathetic observations of 
the unfolding of the spiritual is found in Miss 
Peabody's Lectures to Kinder gar tners, a record of 
the child entrusted to her care to receive his first 
ideas of religion. "What a child cannot under- 

(67) 



The Booklovers Reading 'Club 

stand of religion," says Ruskin, "no man need 
try to," and yet unseeing souls would force open 
the beautiful gate of the temple not knowing 
that it is always open to children. By wise guid- 
ance the implicit faith of childhood may be trans- 
formed gradually into genuine religious feeling. 

A certain delightful German book is dedicated 
"to children and those who love them." Very 
few people would choose to be left out of the latter 
class ; but it would be greatly decreased if limited 
to those who love wisely. To know what to do is 
little easier than to do, but the means of knowledge 
are increasing every day with the growing litera- 
ture on the subject of child culture and the ever 
widening interest it creates. The child's world is 
not a little one, but a wide, goodly land. Happy 
are those able to enter in ! 



(68) 



Handicapped Child- 
hood: A Ten- Minute Talk 

BT EMILIE POULSSON 



(69) 



The true mother is a teacher whether she is con- 
scious of it or not, and the true teacher uses the 
innate mother element ; that which broods over the 
child and warms it into life, as much as she does 
her acquired knowledge. — Elizabeth Harrison. 






Handicapped Child- 
hood: A Ten- Minute Talk 

BY EMILIE POULSSON 



Miss Emilie Poulsson has, since her gradu- 
ation in 1881 from the Misses Garland and Wes- 
ton's Kindergarten Normal School in Boston, 
centred all her interests in the instruction and 
amusement of children. When quite a young 
woman, Miss Poulsson taught for three years in 
the South Boston School for the Blind, resuming 
afterwards the private teaching which had been 
interrupted by a serious increase of the affection 
of the eyes to which she has always been subject. 
Of late years she has been writing assiduously 
in prose and verse. Nursery Finger Plays was 
published in 1889. Since then she has published 
In the Child's World, Through the Farmyard 
Gate, Child Stories and Rhymes, Love and Law 
in Child Training and Holiday Songs. Miss 
Poulsson is now joint editor of the Kindergarten 
Review. 

When there are so many beautiful, bright 
subjects which we might consider, the 
choice of so pitiful a theme as handicapped 
childhood needs, perhaps, a word of apology. 
The excuse for my choice is the only sufficient one 
that can ever be urged for dwelling upon the ills 
of life — the hope of remedying ills that exist and 
the hope of preventing further ills of the same 
sort. Ruskin says : " Men's proper business in 
this world falls mainly into three divisions : First, 

(70 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

to know themselves and the existing state of 
things they have to do with; second, to be 
happy in themselves and the existing state of 
things ; third, to mend themselves and the exist- 
ing state of things as far as either are marred or 
mendable." "These," says Ruskin, "are the 
three plain divisions of proper human business 
on this earth." 

The most heedless person, the most insensible 
on-looker recognizes the grievous hindrance en- 
cumbering the deformed or crippled child, the 
blind child, the deaf child, and the child with im- 
paired brain. The world has gained in merciful 
care for these piteous little people. Society and 
state recognize a duty toward them, and we 
acquiesce approvingly. But society and state are 
large bodies and move slowly and clumsily. They 
need individuals to be to them as the swift foot 
and ready hand for the execution of their benefi- 
cent purposes ; they need individuals to connect 
the needy child with the ministering agency. 
Some of us perceive our duty in respect to this, 
but do we all ? Have we tried, for instance, to 
find out whether there are any such handicapped 
children belonging to the families of our neigh- 
borhood ? And have we made every effort to 
have these little unfortunates placed where they 
can receive fitting help ? 

Many times, medical or surgical aid is the first 
necessity ; but if the sad certainty is discovered 

(7 = ) 



A Course in Child Study 

that the handicap is unremovable by such aid, 
then every endeavor should be made to place the 
child in the way of receiving the aid that will en- 
able him to transcend the handicap as far as is pos- 
sible for him while in the body. And how 
blessedly far this is possible ! How many a soul 
grows erect and full-statured despite the small, 
misshapen body in which it dwells ! 

In a certain city there went up and down the 
streets a bent, humpbacked, weak little man ; but 
he was a beloved physician of extraordinary skill 
in his specialty, which was the treatment of defor- 
mity. I never heard anything about his early 
days and training, but certainly to see him and to 
know his work was to read a story of victory in a 
life race, a victory the grander because of the 
handicaps which had been overcome. 

"It aint so bad bein' blind," said Irish Mary, 
after a few weeks at a school for the blind ; " it 
aint so bad bein' blind when yez can do things. 
Me aunt was always a-sayin', ' You can't do any- 
thing ! You can't peel the praties, or turn a hand 
to the dishes or the scrubbin' ! ' And now, whin I 
go back, won't I show her just ! " 

All this was in a burst of confidence to the 
amanuensis when Mary was dictating her first 
letter home. Mary is now an energetic, intelli- 
gent, self-supporting woman, useful and respected ; 
and her face and bearing declare unmistakably 
that she lives in the light of the truth which she 

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The Booklovers Reading Club 

discovered at the school — " It aint so bad bein' 
blind, when yez can do things." She is still 
handicapped, certainly, but how lightly in com- 
parison with what she would have been had she 
not been placed under proper care when she was 
a child. 

The wonderful stories of Helen Keller, Edith 
Thomas, Willie Elizabeth Robin and Tommy 
Stringer are well known. Blind, deaf, and also 
dumb when little children, they are now to a great 
extent relieved of the third handicap, since they 
can communicate not only by talking with their 
fingers but by articulate speech. The deafness 
and blindness are immeasurably lessened as handi- 
caps by the miracle-working power of wise help 
and education. All of these three girls and 
Tommy spend lives of delight, activity and aspi- 
ration. The handicaps are not removed — alas, 
no ! — but what is the weight of the handicaps now 
compared with what it was ? 

In reply to a question as to whether she had 
made any special resolution for the guidance of 
her life, Helen Keller answered as follows : — 

" I have, like other people, I suppose, made 
many resolutions that I have broken or only half 
kept ; but the one which I send you, and which was 
in my mind long before it took the form of a 
resolution, is the keynote of my life. It is this — 
always to regard as mere impertinences of fate 
the handicaps which were placed upon my life 

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A Course in Child Study 

almost at the beginning. I resolved that they 
should not crush or dwarf my soul, but rather be 
made to 'blossom, like Aaron's rod, with flowers.' " 

"If /am crooked, my verses need not be," 
said a deformed poet (Pope). Think what it 
must be to be awakened by wise teaching and 
training to the realization of the truth suggested 
in that saying ! Spirit and deed can be strong, 
upright, beautiful in spite of the body's defects. 
What joy and what incentive in this revelation ! 
But many a deformed child, many a crippled child, 
is languishing in hopelessness because no one 
bears this message to him. Yet any one of us 
might bear the glad tidings. Our share in bear- 
ing the message may be to inform ourselves as to 
what schools or institutions or other agencies are 
available for children handicapped in these phys- 
ical ways, and then to convince the parents as to 
the benefit of the special place for the special 
child. 

The particularly tender love of parents toward 
their afflicted children makes even the suggestion 
of separation, of sending the child away from home, 
very painful to them. Gently, tactfully, patiently 
must we work with these parents, not expecting 
them to be convinced immediately by our argu- 
ments, and placing the matter before them again 
and again, without accepting denial as the final an- 
swer. We must honor the tender, protecting love 
which makes the parents cling to these little ones. 

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The Booklovers Reading Club 

What will win the day will be the belief in our 
disinterested care for the good of the child. If, 
as is usually the case, there are papers of admis- 
sion to be made out and any kind of red tape to 
be untangled, it will be wise to attend to this for 
the parents if they are willing, since any such for- 
malities are often lions in the way to people not 
accustomed to them, whether ignorant people or 
not. 

By speaking as I have about persuading par- 
ents to send their handicapped children to special 
schools, I do not mean to imply that that is 
always advisable. Sometimes a special teacher 
at home will be more advantageous. Sometimes 
the child will benefit more by being thrown among 
normal children as much as possible. But just 
as it is of great advantage to any child to be 
thrown among his equals, so it is for the handi- 
capped child ; and the special school affords him 
that "fair field and no favor" which every spirit 
craves, and the deprivation of which is some- 
times the greatest sting and injury that is entailed 
by the deafness, blindness, lameness or whatever 
handicap. 

Probably instances of the virtual annulment of 
limitations prescribed by some bodily defect have 
come to the notice of us all. Happy you, if you 
have had a share in making such annulling pos- 
sible ! 

But since, even at the best, even when there is 

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A Course in Child Study 

every chance for emancipating the spirit, these 
children do suffer pain and deprivation, should not 
the greatest effort be made to prevent children 
from being thus handicapped ? 

How pitiful, how terribly pitiful, to know that 
the feeble-mindedness of a child has been caused 
by wrong feeding ; that this child's deafness is 
owing to a blow from his passionate yet affection- 
ate mother, who ought to have known, yet did 
not, the possible result ! How pitiful, again, to 
know that that child's blindness could have been 
prevented by simple cleanliness, the careful 
washing of the new born baby's eyes ! Indeed, 
a great portion of our handicapped children 
might have escaped their unfortunate condition if 
their parents had only known what parents ought 
to know. 

And now suppose we have a handicapped 
child to deal with, at home, in kindergarten, in 
school, in any relation whatever — what shall we 
do ? The answer shines out clear and plain from 
many victorious lives. In all our general treat- 
ment of the child, we should ignore the handicap. 
Treat the child as if the handicap were not. 

Do you know that if a baby who is even totally, 
hopelessly deaf is talked to all through its baby- 
hood as if it could hear, and this treatment is con- 
tinued, the child will grow up not only under- 
standing spoken language, but speaking, also ? 

Do you know that in the schools for the blind 

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The Booklovers Reading Club 

the pupils have taught their teachers to adapt 
their teaching, and especially the appliances, less 
and less ? When the kindergarten was first in- 
troduced at the Perkins Institution for the Blind, 
at South Boston, Mass., the same blunder was 
made repeatedly, only to find that most of the 
adaptation was unnecessary. The root of the 
blunder was that we kept the handicap of these 
children foremost in our thoughts instead of in 
the background. 

With feeble-minded children, too, whatever 
awakening and improvement is possible is achieved 
always by working in this way ; that is, by ignor- 
ing the handicap and addressing, as if it were 
awake, the intelligence which you hope to awaken. 

After all, is not this the method which we see 
successfully practiced every day by the mother 
with her baby ? She talks to him as if he under- 
stood, long before he can understand ; and shortly 
he understands. She treats him as if he could 
walk before he has taken a step ; and behold! her 
faith and hope work the wonder, and he does 
walk. 

Set no limitations, therefore, for the handicapped 
little ones, but let faith and courage incite endeavor 
and be its constant support. With the wonderful 
examples which the world has seen of handicaps 
overcome, we ought to be more chary of say- 
ing that anything is impossible. Who would not 
have said that it would be impossible for a blind 

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A Course in Child Study 

man to observe bees to any purpose? Yet Huber 
is a prominent authority on this subject, suppos- 
edly impossible as a study for a blind man. What 
more patent barrier to the work of an artist than 
to lack the very hands for wielding the brush ? 
Yet we have the armless painter. To be para- 
lyzed from below the waist and only able to go 
about as much as a wheeled chair allows would 
seem to condemn a solitary woman to narrow 
limits. Yet such a person has gone to Europe, 
making the journey without friend or maid, and is 
pursuing her chosen studies there as independ- 
ently and indefatigably as if there existed no ap- 
parently impossible barrier against it. 

The truest love and the truest pity is that which 
looks through the imperfect and marred body and 
sees ever the power of the spirit to transcend the 
physical handicap and makes constant appeal to 
that power. The disregarding attitude toward 
the trouble as a handicap or limitation is quite 
compatible with the tenderest consideration for 
the child and his comfort. The great point is 
that in our association with such children we 
should keep clear in our own minds the fact that 
the handicap's power is limited while the power of 
the human spirit, by virtue of its divine element, 
is illimitable. 



^^h^tJU. f^C^^TTrt 



(79) 



Elementary education is nothing else but a su- 
preme return to the truest and simplest form of 

educational art, the education of the hoine. 

Pestalozzi. 



Child Study as 
Synthesis: a Talk 

BY KATE GANNETT WELLS 



6g (8i) 



Child Study as 
Synthesis: a Talk 

BY KATE GANNETT WELLS 



Mrs. Kate Gannett Wells, a descendant of 
Mary Chilton of the "Mayflower" and of Presi- 
dent Ezra Stiles of Yale University, is the daugh- 
ter and sister of Unitarian clergymen. Born in 
England during the temporary residence of her 
father, Ezra Stiles Gannett, she was educated in 
Boston, where she still lives. Mrs. Wells is prom- 
inent in her own home as a member of the State 
Board of Education and a writer on normal 
methods and school ethics. For over two score 
years she has been zealous in humanitarian labors. 
Her stories, In the Clearings, Miss Curtis and Two 
Modern Women share public attention with a vol- 
ume of essays, About People. 



Child study has become such an organized 
11 fad " that observation of the child, the 
type, is hindering recognition of this, that and 
the other child, for a child may be very different 
from the child. This calm acceptance of the " era 
of the child" has already resulted in a woful sub- 
mission on the part of parents and teachers to the 
child and in a still more grievous assertion on 
the child's part of his importance to the universe. 
Even the exaggerated kindergarten phraseology 
that first infected natural speech now yields pre- 
cedence to the language of child study with its 

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The Booklovers Reading Club 

analyses and its heraldic motto, " Do justice to 
the nature of a child," until nursery discipline 
and mother's love are being dominated by the 
pedagogic command, "Observe! Observe!" 

Though possibly Froebel might rejoice in this 
modern outgrowth of his sentiment, it is doubtful 
whether the sturdier intellects of Comenius and 
Pestalozzi would not revolt against the emascu- 
lated logic of what is often called child study, but 
which does not represent its large, persistent, 
real worth. Child study is truly a most important 
course in the training of teachers and of parents, 
even if to the latter it is a home-taught science. 
Finding its source in natural affection it yet best 
expresses itself in verified formulas which train 
the student in knowledge of the child, somewhat 
as art, though going back to nature for authority, 
yet announces her message to the world in pre- 
scribed values of decoration, composition and 
harmony. 

The only trouble in child study lies in its being 
pursued chiefly by the deductive process. Ob- 
servations are heaped upon observations and 
then classified under various headings, that tes- 
tify to the industry of the observer more than to 
his intelligent separation of comparatively worth- 
less from valuable data. It is all analysis, be- 
cause, says the observer, the time has not come 
for synthesis, forgetting, in his mania for collect- 
ing, that each child must be taken as a whole, its 

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A Course in Child Study 

nationality, heredity and environment contributing 
to its personality. 

A playground is a far better place than a 
school-room in which to study the unadulterated 
child and to pursue the synthetic method of child 
study. There nationalities count first, else the 
Polish Jew would not twit the Italian with the 
nickname of " Banana," who retorts to this verbal 
missile with a vigorous blow, vindicating the 
justice of his action by quoting the Jew's own 
refrain, " An eye for an eye and a tooth for a 
tooth." The very ways of petty theft indicate 
nationality. Though an unrelenting, personal 
dignity on the part of teachers may have a re- 
straining effect upon the children of Moses, the 
power of a smile holds the Italian in check ; but 
it takes both smile and dignity to control the 
colored children, who yet, when obedient, surpass 
their playmates in desire to help their officers. 
In a playground also, the Irish Catholic seems 
more liberal than the Israelitish ritualist, at least 
as far as games and food are concerned, while 
Jewish, Irish, Italian and colored children partake 
alike of that pathetic meekness, through which 
the constantly new baby is tended by its sister, 
but little older than itself. " It never does to 
lose one's temper in a playground," as the super- 
intendent of one of them said, "since there is no 
time to find it again." 

The American child, however, must be studied 



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The Booklovers Reading Club 

in the home of his self-sacrificing parents or else 
in the conventional school-room, where all chil- 
dren are soon absorbed into the conglomerate 
mass of the child, who, so far, has been princi- 
pally studied in homes and schools of the so- 
called middle and upper classes. Therefore the 
type has been comparatively constant and has 
enabled a philanthropic mother to transfer her 
observations from her cultured home to the 
"mothers' club" of a "settlement house," whose 
women may admire her way of putting things but 
will condemn her methods as not suited to them. 

Their criticisms on her categories of child 
thought well indicate the manifold variations of 
children from the type child. Take the subject 
of punishment for example. The type child must 
not be whipped ; the exceptional child may be, to 
the great advantage of all concerned. Hence it 
is in just such variations from the actual or the 
ideal type that is found the need for child study, 
lest parents and teachers neither rejoice nor 
grieve unduly. 

The amount of divergence from the supposed 
type is now often recorded by statistically inclined 
parents in specially prepared scrap-books. Very 
carefully is such work done after the birth of the 
first child, carelessness usually increasing accord- 
ing to the frequency of subsequent births. Such 
records, useful as family tools in the bringing up 
of children, also become accumulated data for 



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A Course in Child Study 

general service in the training of the races. Let 
no mother forego the keeping of them. They 
will help her if her children live, and if death 
takes them from her care the records of what 
they did and were will solace her loneliness. 
Still there is no more dreary reading than the 
diary of an analytic psychologist or child study- 
ing parent, who makes a diagram of her first 
child's first smile and estimates the growth of its 
tactile powers. But in time there comes the joy- 
ful record of her child's first intelligent command, 
of his early ideas about God, prayer, conscience, 
all of which are intensely interesting, especially to 
the child himself in later adult life. Then, as other 
children are born into the same family, such rec- 
ords become of large value in showing how far 
the forces of environment and heredity can be 
controlled by education, for personal interest in 
family data, when extended into a comprehensive 
plan of child study, may become useful to every- 
one for the sake of every one. 

Why the same method of guidance that suc- 
ceeds with one child fails with another is a matter 
for study. The old fashioned, devout mother 
ascribed results to Providence ; the modern 
mother is in search of a formula to help the 
race ; the natural mother believes that in the in- 
tuitions of love is found the fulfilment of law, the 
victory over evil heredity and untoward circum- 
stance, and guides her acts towards her children 

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The Booklovers Reading Club 

by her wise sympathies with them. She studies 
them to regulate herself by them quite as much 
as to rule them, and is more conscious of her 
mistakes than of theirs ; child study becomes 
heightened by her diagnosis into a self-conscious 
study of her capacity for motherhood and her 
records aid her discrimination. 

The teacher, however, cannot wait on time and 
circumstance to the same degree as the mother, 
and thus his results of child study inevitably fall 
into groups. If his analyses are larger they yet 
may mislead as to the individual child. Not- 
withstanding, it is with the modifications of the 
type child, from whatever cause, that child study 
must concern itself, balancing one factor against 
another, until the result is a sy?ithetic study of a 
child, rather than an analytic study of the child. 
It is only by synthesis that we learn not to des- 
pair of progress, individual or national. " On the 
whole," a current Americanism — the phrase of 
that synthetic state of mind by which we mean 
that, all things considered, we decide so and so — 
has a significance which needs now to be placed 
upon child study, to correct its over analysis. 
Let each mother do this in a large way, not by 
daily records or prescribed formulas alone, but by 
now-and-then retrospects of the growth of her 
children. Such long reviews would not interfere 
with her jotting down of special incidents and 
remarks and would enable her to see each 



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A Course in Child Study 

child as a whole and to make comparisons by- 
wholes. 

It is in this way that the "remarks" of a 
teacher appended to her lists of averages con- 
cerning her pupils are of more value than all her 
recorded, analytic percentages, for the " remarks " 
are her syntheses concerning the children. On 
the same principle positions are awarded teachers 
for their "personal fitness," which is the equiva- 
lent of a synthetic estimate of their ability. 

Child study thus pursued becomes a most help- 
ful feature in the adaptation of parents and 
teachers to children, save that if it is left solely to 
women it will soon have the one-sided value of 
the kindergarten. The more subtle the per- 
sonality of both parent and teacher, the less will 
the child know it is being observed and the less 
will it be disposed to attribute its discipline to the 
results of a "mothers' meeting." Only by child 
study can the noblest fruition of parenthood and 
education be achieved, love rather than formula 
being its inspiration. 



(89) 



We cannot educate our grand?nother, we say ; 
but there are grandmothers whom we can educate. 

The children of today are the grandmothers of 
the future ; we can educate them. 

Alice Wellington Rollins. 



IDEALS OF CHILD 
CULTURE: A Talk by 

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN 



(90 



IDEALS OF CHILD 
CULTURE: A Talk by 

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN 



Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a New Eng- 
land woman, the great granddaughter of Lyman 
Beecher, the grand niece of Harriet Beecher 
Stowe and of Henry Ward Beecher. While in her 
twenties, Mrs. Gilman went to California, where 
she pursued her work for woman, for labor, and 
for "reform" generally by lecturing and through 
her paper called The Impress. In 1898 she pub- 
lished two important books — a volume of poems, 
In This Our World and a book on Women and 
Economics, which attracted much attention. Her 
poem, Similar Cases, a satirical allegory, has 
been widely quoted. For a time Mrs. Gilman was 
a resident of Hull House, a social settlement in 
Chicago. She has lectured extensively in this 
country and Great Britain ; and during the last 
few years her papers urging equality of the sexes 
and various reforms have frequently appeared in 
the leading magazines. She recently published 
a notable book Concerning Children. 

Are you a mother who is willing to learn some- 
thing more of humaniculture ? Have you 
the deep wide human interest in the young mem- 
ber of society now so- absolutely in your hands, 
but none the less a representative of a new step, 
a farther step in the progress of the race ? Of 
course, you love him as your own ; but remem- 
ber, every female animal does that as well as you. 
Passionate, self-sacrificing, instinctive love is com- 

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The Booklovers Reading Club 

mon to all motherhood. Human motherhood 
needs something more. Human motherhood 
needs wisdom — knowledge and wisdom. These 
do not come by instinct. With the lower animals 
all that is needed is to rear the young creature in 
health and safety and teach him to take care of 
himself; and, bear or fox or deer or donkey, 
the mother can do her duty alone and does it. 
To establish a human creature successfully in- 
volves far more than this. Even in the primary 
conditions of health and safety, the mother can 
do little alone ; and in the extending processes of 
education she has a task as much larger and more 
complex than that of earlier mothers as society is 
larger and more complex than a herd of deer. 
The main use and purpose of an animal is to 
take care of himself and improve his race by 
direct transmission. The main use and purpose 
of a human creature is to take care of other 
people and improve his race through all the 
numberless avenues of social conditions. Child 
study is the study of the young of the human 
species with a view to the improvement of that 
species. We have striven long and valiantly with 
all the engines of church and state to make peo- 
ple better. Now we are beginning to study how 
to make better people. Improvement through 
heredity must be taught to the young men and 
maidens ; we cannot improve the heredity of the 
child after it is born. Child study is to show us 

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A Course in Child Study 

how to improve the race as we have it. Improve- 
ment through conditions is being urged all along 
the lines of social progress — parks, playgrounds, 
baths, libraries, better schools, better streets, 
better cities — all this is at present mainly in the 
fathers' hands. Mothers do not yet care enough 
for children to do their duty by them as citizens ; 
but they do care enough, some of them, to take 
up child study. 

We have in the child an undeveloped creature 
full of latent traits and abilities, the ultimate 
manifestation of which will make or mar his hap- 
piness in great degree. It is the business of the 
educator so to adjust the surrounding conditions 
of the child and his direct training as to bring out 
the best balance of faculties with the least ex- 
pense of nervous capital to the child. To do this 
we must know what a child is and how it works, 
how to produce the desired changes in character 
without accompanying injury. We have the adult 
human creature before us to study, his faults and 
his virtues. We wish to learn how to develop in 
successive generations of children the group of 
qualities most valuable to humanity, always re- 
stricted by the limitations of personal character 
in each child. For instance, courage is a most 
valuable human characteristic. We wish to de- 
velop courage in all children ; but if one particu- 
lar George or Georgiana is markedly deficient in 
courage and especially strong in patience or cour- 

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The Booklovers Reading Club 

tesy, we do not wish to lower the average by too 
much insistence on one faculty. There are very 
useful people in the world who are painfully lack- 
ing in some desirable traits ; and while, on the 
one hand, we wish to call out all the good quali- 
ties possible, on the other we do not wish to sacri- 
fice a good pear tree in the effort to make it bear 
oranges. 

Practical psychology is the main lack in our 
treatment of children. We lack it quite suffi- 
ciently in our treatment of each other as adults, 
but it is a sucking vacuum in our crude efforts at 
child culture. The basic lines of the work before 
us are something like these : here is a young 
human ; constitution and character partly predi- 
cate from our knowledge of one or two preced- 
ing generations, but mainly to be discovered. 
Our purpose is to make this the best possible 
specimen of its kind with the least possible loss 
and waste. The method is : (a) By observation 
of its nature and conduct under ordinary condi- 
tions and by careful continuous record of the 
same ; (d) by application of special conditions, on 
lines suggested by natural conduct, to see if re- 
sponse bears out our previous observation ; [c) 
by continued application of those conditions which 
elicit the conduct we consider desirable. 

The child's character is manifested in his be- 
havior. We must study behavior to discover 
character. Character is modified by the reaction 

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A Course in Child Study 

of behavior to a considerable extent, but far more 
by conscious choice and volition. So far the 
main line of treatment in child culture has been 
to enforce certain behavior by any means at hand, 
hoping perhaps for a resultant modification of 
character. Right here is our principal error. We 
have ignored the inner nature of the live thing in 
our hands and sought only to "make it behave." 
The proper behavior of the child, while a child, 
has been our main desideratum regardless of 
the unseen effects on character, and so on the 
ultimate behavior of the adult. Childhood is but 
a transient period : what we are rearing are not 
children but adults ; we are making people. What 
we want in the grown person is such and such 
a character ; what we want in the child is the 
orderly development of that character ; and this 
development is to be produced by practice, not by 
the arbitrary doing of certain specified things, but 
by the right method of doing anything whatever. 
For instance, if a child is slowly developing judg- 
ment by repeated exercise of that faculty, even 
through a number of foolish mistakes, that is far 
better education than if he were coerced into 
doing the right thing without effort of his own 
and so developed no judgment whatever. 

Certain qualities we must have in all civilized 
society, we must seek to develop in all children. 
Self-restraint is one of them, and another is its 
accompanying self-direction. We all try to incul- 

7G (97) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

cate self-restraint by various crude means ; but 
few indeed carefully practice a child in self-direc- 
tion. Now you might develop a Spartan stoic in 
self-restraint who would be of no earthly use, for 
lack of proper initiative. Love of one another is 
one of the prominent requisites for advanced 
human beings. We talk about this at church but 
take almost no means to develop it in children. 
The family affections they come into naturally 
and are trained in religiously ; but they have no 
proportionate training in that love for all the 
world which is given us as the second command- 
ment, "like unto" the love of God, and which is 
not only the distinguishing precept of our religion 
but the keystone of civilization. 

Of all human faculties the most distinctive, 
most desirable, most generally present and most 
conspicuously neglected in child culture is reason. 
Even love is of small use from a fool or to a fool. 
The greatest thing love could do to a fool would 
be to give him his reason. The power to think, 
to judge, to decide, to connect and relate — this is 
the human faculty. All children not idiotic have 
it. All grown persons show more or less trace 
of it. But most of our natural faculty of reason- 
ing is lost by disuse and abuse in childhood. If 
children were not encouraged to talk, were ridi- 
culed and punished for talking, and were sur- 
rounded with gibberish instead of conversation, we 
should not find much development in language. 



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A Course in Child Study 



The lack of reason in the surroundings of chil- 
dren, the utter unreason of much of their treat- 
ment, and the persistent discouragement of their 
attempts to be reasonable are quite sufficient to 
account for Carlyle's gloomy generalization. 

To return to practical psychology. Action is 
transmitted energy. In low stages of organic 
development the creature acts under direct im- 
pression, that is, he promptly reacts. In the 
development of higher brain faculties there is 
found a longer and more perfect retention of im- 
pressions, a greatly increased number of these 
impressions, and an increased power to correlate 
them and act from their stored energy. A highly 
organized brain remembers many things long and 
accurately, puts two and two together, or even 
ten and ten, and acts from the balanced force of 
long-held numbers instead of the immediate stim- 
ulus of one. This is what distinguishes men from 
beasts and the wise from the foolish. If we wish 
to produce a man or a woman capable of a rational 
action, we need to train the child in habits of 
rational action. " Action " here refers not to the 
deed done but to the way the child works ; as in 
the action of a horse or a machine. Not " Does 
the child do such and such things?" or "Does 
he obey promptly?" but "Does he act rationally?" 
and "Does he show increasing ability to act ration- 
ally ? " If he does not, the next questions are : " Is 
the child lacking in intellect? " and "What is the 

L.ofC ( 99 ) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

matter with his education ? " It is proven by care- 
fully recorded efforts that even idiots may be 
trained so as to increase their rational power ; and 
if idiots can be so trained why not children of 
sense ? Careful study of the child shows that he is 
rational, but that the condition of childhood means 
that impressions are generally slight and transient 
as well as necessarily limited ; in other words, that 
he "forgets " easily and does not know much. 

The latest power of human development is 
naturally the slowest to appear in the child, the 
power of governing his own acts from his own 
reason. Therefore, we should present to the baby 
brain a carefully graduated series of impressions, 
such as are clear, definite, in their natural order, 
easy to remember and connect. The trained eye 
carefully observing his progress will soon see 
what are his natural faculties, in what order they 
develop, and which need special help. 

Most important is that highest power of judi- 
cious action from his own decision. Every time 
the young experimenter in living is seen to ob- 
serve accurately, judge wisely, and act accord- 
ingly, he is practicing that series of coordinate 
nerve processes which go to build up the strong, 
wise, reliable man. If the child's mind is full of 
a hotchpotch of disproportionate and false ideas, 
there is something terribly wrong in his environ- 
ment. In concrete instance, see the baby learn- 
ing life of a nursemaid, where we find not only 

(100) 



A Course in Child Study 



all manners of ignorance and negative error, but 
often positive terrorizing. An irregular and con- 
fused memory in a child indicates that those im- 
measurably important first impressions must have 
come too thick and fast or not in their natural 
order. If the child shows inability to act even up 
to his own standard and knowledge, he has not 
been trained in self-governing activities. 

Not only child study but man and woman 
study shows this condition as almost universal. 
The most conspicuous lack in human nature is 
this power to govern our own action even up to 
the level of our own standards ; more than any 
other training we need to be trained in this — not 
to do as others do or as we are told, but as we 
ourselves see to be right. 

Our children have been treated so far with the 
lingering rudiments of humanity's oldest methods ; 
methods of government and methods of education 
which adult civilization has outgrown by thou- 
sands of years. It is true that the child passes 
through the previous stages of our long exist- 
ence, but not true that he should be treated after 
their methods. As a man he will represent the 
stage beyond us, and he needs our very highest 
to fit him to go higher still. 



(IOI) 



Representative Views 



SUPPLEMENTARY THOUGHTS 
ON CHILD STUDY BY NOTABLE 
TEACHERS AND WRITERS 



(103) 



Representative Views 

G. Stanley Hall. 
"One of the oldest objections to child study, 
now very rarely heard, is that it is liable to inter- 
fere in some way with the naivete of children, and 
to make them self-conscious. A few years ago I 
heard a prominent professor declare, with great 
emphasis, before an audience of applauding Boston 
schoolmasters, that, as for his own children, they 
should never be mentally vivisected ; that they 
should be loved, not studied, etc. Love and study 
in this field, as in that of natural science, instead 
of interfering with, strengthen each other. Not 
only are we better parents and teachers for both 
knowing and doing this work, but those who fail 
to utilize it are neglecting some of the most 
urgent new duties of a new age." 

"Among the more incidental advantages of the 
study of children is the new bond which it often 
establishes between the home and the school. 
The teacher who no longer regards his pupils as 
marionettes, to be treated as groups or classes, 
but as free units, with a bond of sympathy between 
each of their hearts and his own, desires to know 
at least something of the home life of each child, 
and to come to an understanding with parents. 
Hence many very different organizations have 
arisen, from Superintendent Dutton's educational 

(105) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

club in Brookline, Mass., to the circles of mothers 
who meet the teachers weekly after school at De- 
troit, Mich." 

"Another advantage of interest in child study is 
that it helps to break down to some extent the 
partitions between grades of work, so that the 
kindergarten and university professor can cooper- 
ate in the same task. Best of all, perhaps, it tends 
to make family life with plenty of children in it 
more interesting and desirable. Indeed, it is a 
part of a great culture movement, marked by a 
new love of the naive, the spontaneous, and the un- 
sophisticated ; by a desire to get at what is primi- 
tive and original in human nature as it comes 
fresh from its primal sources. A prevalent theory 
in art insists that the greatest defect of all art 
products is a sign of conscious design, and that 
the acme of aesthetic enjoyment is reached when 
it is realized that the poem or picture is a product 
of unconscious creative force, more or less irre- 
sistible, and, as with the greatest geniuses, with 
no thought of effect. Just so in childhood we are 
coming again to realize that in its fresh thoughts, 
feelings, and impulses we have an oracle which 
declares that the world and human nature are 
sound to the core." 

JUL 

Edward Howard Griggs. 
11 It is in relation to this practical work of edu- 
cation that our effort to study children gets its 

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A Course in Child Study 

human value. There are always two points of 
view possible with reference to life. From the 
standpoint of nature and science, individuals count 
for little. Nature can waste a thousand acorns to 
raise one oak ; hundreds of children may be sacri- 
ficed that a truth may be seen. But from the 
ethical and human point of view the meaning of 
all life is in each individual. That one child should 
be lost is a kind of ruin to the universe. 

" It is this second point of view which every 
parent and every teacher must take ; and the 
great practical value of our new study of children 
is that it brings us into personal relation with the 
child world, and so aids in that subtle touch of life 
upon life which is the very heart of education." 

Susan Blow.. 
" By many persons Froebel is supposed to be 
the avowed champion of two very popular, very 
plausible, but very dangerous educational heresies, 
against which his whole system is a protest. One 
of these heresies has been called sugar-plum edu- 
cation ; the other has been fitly baptized flower-pot 
education. Sugar-plum education in its moral 
aspect means coaxing, cajolery, and bribery ; in 
its intellectual aspect it is the parent of that 
specious and misleading maxim that the chief aim 
of the educator is to interest the child. Like the 
theory which wrecks happiness by making it the 
aim of life, the effort to win interest results in 



(107) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

methods which kill interest. The end of life is 
not happiness, but goodness ; the aim of education 
is not to interest the child, but to incite and guide 
his self-activity. Seeking goodness we win happi- 
ness ; inciting self-activity we quicken interest. 
Now for the flower-pot. Flower-pot education 
means the effort to make the child wise and good 
through the influence of an artificially perfect en- 
vironment. You will take your tender plant out 
of the common ground and away from the common 
air and keep it safe by setting it in a sunny win- 
dow of your own room. The struggle for life may 
mean something for other plants, but you will im- 
prove on the divine method in rearing your choice 
rose. Two false assumptions are latent in your 
procedure : first, the assumption that character 
may be formed without effort ; and second, the 
assumption that evil is only outside your child, 
and not at all in him. 

" But flower-pot and sugar-plum education are 
attacks upon freedom. The former holds that the 
child may be molded by environment, the latter 
that his blind impulses may be played upon by 
the educator. Froebel holds that he is a free 
being, and therefore must be a self-making being. 
Hence, while sugar-plum education appeals to the 
activity of the educator, the flower-pot education 
to the activity of environment, Froebel appeals 
first, last, and always to the self-activity of the 
child." 



(.08) 



A Course in Child Study 

Mrs. S. M. I. Henry. 

" In religious matters we shall save ourselves 
a great deal of trouble if we remember that the 
child is at first all physical, as the lily is all bulb. 
He holds within him the germ of all that is to be 
of him ; but it must be permitted to follow its own 
law of development, or it will be ruined. After a 
while he begins to manifest the signs of mental 
growth ; but the spiritual nature is of much later 
awakening — first the bud, then the bloom. It is 
of no use at all to expect the bulb to be the 
blossom, or the body to be or act like the soul ; 
and if you treat it as if it were, you lose all. It is 
of the earth, earthy ; it can live only on material 
things, as the bulb lives in and from the soil. The 
stalk and the leaf also are not the blossom, but 
necessary to it. God knows its appointed time, 
and if He can have His way with you and your 
child, He will bring forth, by-and-by, its perfect 
beauty and crown. The bulb dies that the lily 
may come to perfection. So with man — first 
that which is earthy ; then, by slower growth, 
through life and death to newer life, that which 
is spiritual." 

JUL 

Tacob Abbott. 

11 There is a certain sense in which we should 
feel a sympathy with children in the wrong that 
they do. It would seem paradoxical to say that 
in any sense there should be sympathy with sin, 

(109) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

and yet there is a sense in which this is true, 
though perhaps, strictly speaking, it is sympathy 
with the trial and temptation which led to the sin 
rather than with the act of transgression itself. 
In whatever light a nice metaphysical analysis 
would lead us to regard it, it is certain that the 
most successful efforts that have been made by 
philanthropists for reaching the hearts and reform- 
ing the conduct of criminals and malefactors have 
been prompted by a feeling of compassion for 
them, not merely for the sorrows and sufferings 
which they have brought upon themselves by their 
wrong-doing, but for the mental conflicts which 
they endured, the fierce impulses of appetite and 
passion, more or less connected with and depend- 
ent upon the material condition of the bodily 
organs, under the onset of which their feeble moral 
sense, never really brought into a condition of 
health and vigor, was overborne. These merciful 
views of the diseased condition and action of the 
soul in the commission of crime are not only in 
themselves right views for man to take of the 
crimes and sins of his fellow-man, but they lie at 
the foundation of all effort that can afford any 
serious hope of promoting reformation. 

" This principle is eminently true in its appli- 
cation to children. They need the influence of a 
kind and considerate sympathy when they have 
done wrong, more, perhaps, than at any other 
time ; and the effects of the proper manifestation 

(no) 



A Course in Child Study 

of this sympathy on the part of the mother will, 
perhaps, be greater and more salutary in this case 
than in any other. Of course, the sympathy must' 
be of the right kind, and must be expressed in the 
right way, so as not to allow the tenderness or 
compassion for the wrong-doer to be mistaken for 
approval or justification of the wrong." 

JUL 

Florence Hull Winterburn 

" A very unpleasing trait in a child and one 
that occasions frequent reprimands is a habit of 
self-excuse. Some children are so ready and 
fertile in reply that it becomes almost impossible 
to convict them of error. They have to be 
'pinned down,' as it were, and even then show a 
surprising ingenuity in making explanations, 
which, without being precisely untrue, are a turn- 
ing of points in their own favor. When a child 
shows this disposition the right plan is not to 
blame him directly, but manage so that when he 
is in the wrong circumstances will convict him. 
The logic of facts is incontrovertible, and arouses 
no feeling of animosity toward persons. It is 
also desirable to refrain from that common temp- 
tation, ' driving a fault home.' Children do not 
like the valley of humiliation any better than we 
do ourselves, and do not derive any benefit to 
their character from being forced into it. A look, 
half-smiling, half-accusing, is efficacious ; but words 
arouse the defensive instinct and lead to excuses." 



(in) 



Stimulative Questions 




he questions which follow 
bear upon the topics of 
the course as presented 
in the hand-book. They 
aim to stimulate further 
research as well as to test the amount of 
information gained. Full and thought- 
ful answers (written out if possible) 
will greatly assist in changing transitory 
impressions into permanent ones, and 
will make a fixed point of departure for 
further study. 



8g 



("3) 



STIMULATIVE QUESTIONS 



1. What is meant by the "point of contact at the 
plane of experience ?" 

2. How do negative methods of training react upon 
the character of the child ? 

3. What relationship frequently exists between unde- 
veloped sense-impression and intellectual or moral 
dulness ? 

4. Is a bad habit more easily displaced by suppress- 
ing it directly or by building up other habits of an op- 
posite tendency, thus accomplishing the change indi- 
rectly ? 

5. What effect have children's plays upon their 
character ? 

6. What of the mental and moral effects of physical 
culture ? 

7. Can self-activity be perfect as long as it is in any 
degree dependent upon environment ? 

8. Which should be educated first, the child's intel- 
lect or emotions ? 

9. Is there any real antagonism between politeness 
and sincerity ? 

10. Does the reward system exert a beneficial or a 
degrading influence upon the character of the child ? 

11. Would abundant sympathy tend to destroy or to 
promote self -consciousness in a sensitive child ? 

12. What would you do to awaken a child's conscience 
when there seems to be no realization of wrong, his 
only desire being to keep from detection or punishment ? 

(114) 



A Course in Child Study 

13. How far should the same methods be applied to 
Sunday school as to day school methods ? 

14. In arranging school programs should reasoning 
lessons or memory lessons come first ? 

15. Which comes first educationally, the root or the 
flower ? A knowledge of how the world was made or of 
what the world is ? 

16. Why should children of six years not generally be 
put into the same class with children of ten ? 

17. When is a teacher misled by a child's attitude of 
delight or interest ? 

18. Which is the natural condition of the young child, 
belief or skepticism ? 

19. Is it possible to secure a child's cooperation, yet 
at the same time retain authority over him ? 

20. Why do some children have good physical and 
intellectual control and yet lack prudence ? May this 
condition be attributed to poor health, impulse, inability 
to realize ideals, or home or school government ? 

21. Do children's savings-banks tend to develop 
instincts of miserliness or of ultimate generosity ? 

22. Does the cultivation of the esthetic instinct exert 
a beneficial effect upon the morals of children ? 

23. Do modern educational methods which tend to 
smooth the way for children promote the most robust 
development of their powers ? 

24. Is antagonism essential to achievement ? How 
would you apply this point in child development ? 

25. What place has symbolism in the education of the 
child ? 

26. Why are optimism and enthusiasm such potent 
factors in child development ? 

(115) 



Topics for Special Papers 
and for Open Discussion 

i. Which is the stronger factor in child development, 
heredity or environment ? Can one counteract the other ? 

2. What evidence is there, if any, that literature be- 
yond the child's plane of experience is beneficial ? 

3. Is it advisable to teach the Santa Claus myth to 
children ? 

4. How far would you eliminate the cruel and re- 
pulsive from children's literature ? 

5. The border line between imagination and untruth. 
How should it be treated ? 

6. Are fairy tales beneficial or harmful to the mental 
and moral development of childhood ? 

7. How may the best mind expansion be gained with 
the least disturbance of the physical equilibrium ? 

8. How far has mere memorizing a part in mental 
development ? 

9. The sense of humor in children. 

10. Character building. 

11. Indications of genius. 

12. The children of the poor. 

13. The child's Sunday. 

14. Vacation study. 

15. The subconscious self. 

16. Children's reading. 

17. The home church. 

18. Practical methods of overcoming fear, contradic- 
toriness and disrespect. 

(116) 



SUPPLEMENTARY BOOKS 

Recommended for this course by 

MARGARET E. SANGSTER 

Gentle Measures in the Management and 
Training of the Young. By Jacob Abbott. 

Although this book is thirty years old it still remains 
one of the best popular books ever written on the 
subject of personal child training in the home. Its 
keynote may be said to be authority , and the 
general strain is that of the maintenance of parental 
authority by measures which are calming and quiet- 
ing, or pleasurably exciting, rather than by those 
which inflame and irritate, or are painfully exciting. 
It is sound in principle, thoroughly interesting, as 
well as informing and stimulating. 

From the Child's Standpoint. By Florence 

Hull Winterburn. 

Here is good sense, strongly put. " A series of little 
studies or sketches, woven together by a slight thread, 
in which I have tried to relate, as the child's spokes- 
man, some of his ideas, feelings and needs." 

A Study of a Child. By Louise E. Hogan. 

A mother's unclassified record or diary of the first 
eight years of her child's life. Parts of it show, quite 
unconsciously to herself, what a discerning mother 
the author was. She understood principles, had the 
character to stand by them, and learned from her 
own mistakes. 



(ii7) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 
Child Culture in the Home. By Martha B. 

Mosher. 

Essays on the home training of children ; charac- 
terized by common sense and unusual discernment. 
The subjects of heredity and environment are well 
handled. 

Studies in Home and Child Life. By Mrs. 

S. M. I. Henry. 

Readable essays, or discussions on topics appropriate 
to the title. Strongly religious in impulse, with fre- 
quent reference to Scripture as authority and as 
illustration. 

GENERAL REFERENCE LIST. 

Children's Rights. By Kate Douglas Wiggin and 
Nora A. Smith. 

A number of essays on various topics suggested by 
the title. Three of them are by Nora A. Smith. 
These sisters are, as is well known, accomplished 
kindergartners and both write incisively. A good 
book for those whose attention has never been espe- 
cially called to the fact that the child has rights and 
suffers wrongs at the hands of those who love him. 

Love and Law in Child Training. By 

Emilie Poulsson. 

Parents who claim to love their children do not 
always know how to subject themselves to law in 
order that they may rightly lay down law to their 
children. This book is intended to help mothers in 

(>i8) 



A Course in Child Study 

this predicament. The chapters on the Santa Claus 
question handle this troublesome problem with a 
degree of philosophical understanding and sanity 
savoring of finality. 

Two Children of the Foothills. By Elizabeth 

Harrison. 

It may fairly be said that this book is without a par- 
allel in educational literature. The circumstances 
out of which it grew are unique. An expert kinder- 
gartner with a companion spending a year in the 
foothills of California, having occasional oversight of 
two children who knew nothing of social life, made 
a complete demonstration of the fundamental truths 
in Froebel's Mother Play. The tact, delicacy, dis- 
crimination, insight, balance and fidelity to the prin- 
ciple of unhindered self-activity, resulted in an 
unmistakable endorsement of the principles of the 
Froebelian system. Some knowledge of the Mother 
Play will help to a better understanding of this 
book which, although a true record, reads with the 
fascination of romance. 



Letters to a Mother. By Susan E. Blow. 

The exposition of some fundamental principles of 
Froebel's Mother Play written in the form of letters 
addressed to a mother, by the greatest living ex- 
ponent of the kindergarten and the Froebelian system 
of educational philosophy and practice. Although 
these chapters are in epistolary form they are from 
the philosophical point of view profound and funda- 
mental, and from the literary point of view brilliant, 
eloquent and inspiring. Fascinating as they are 

(119) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

they cannot be read without much thinking, and 
their full value can be appreciated only by one who 
has more or less acquaintance with Froebel's Mother 
Play. 

Children's Ways. By James Sully. 

A shorter and more popular treatment of the same 
general kind as the Studies of Childhood by the same 
author. Abstruse discussions have been cut out and 
technical language in large degree dropped. New 
matter, however, has been added, thus making it 
virtually a new work. It is full of illustrative inci- 
dent drawn from many sources and is interesting 
to the degree of being entertaining, yet seriously 
instructive. The author is a distinguished English 
psychologist. 

The Contents of Children's Minds. By G. 

Stanley Hall. 

Results of experiments conducted by Dr. Hall on 
many Boston school children in order to arrive at 
some definite knowledge of children's conceptions of 
things which are matters of every-day commonplace 
to the average adult. 

Hints on Child Training. By H. Clay Trum- 
bull. 

Child training and child study are so closely allied 
that consideration of the one more or less involves 
consideration of the other. This book is written 
from the trainer's point of view with rare insight, 
sound sense and practical wisdom. It consists of 
thirty chapters, brief, pointed, with abundant illus- 
tration. 



(.20) 



A Course in Child Study 



Talks to Teachers on Psychology, and to 
Students on Some of Life's Ideals. By 

William James. 

These lectures by one of the most eminent psychol- 
ogists of our day have a high literary quality and are 
delightful reading. 

Biography of a Baby. By Milicent W. Shinn. 

A scientifically exact yet popularly written biography 
of a baby during its first year. Miss Shinn is the 
baby's aunt, but this does not bias her view. Scien- 
tifically, the story turns mainly on the study of 
muscle sense with sight, and muscle sense with touch, 
and then a re-combination of the two. The mouth 
and not the hand is the primitive touch organ. Miss 
Shinn's inferences are thoroughly independent and 
she makes many of them practical. Many a mother 
will read the book for its fascination as a story, 
even though she be unable to fathom its full sig- 
nificance. The literary style is strong, clear and 
fascinating, with a more or less constant twinkle of 
humor. 

Concerning Children. By Charlotte Perkins Gil- 
man. 

Radical and vigorous in style. The discussion of 
the nurse-maid and the neighborhood oversight of 
children is suggestive. Especially noteworthy is 
the chapter on « The Respect Due to Youth." 

A Mother's Ideals. By Andrea Hofer Proudfoot. 
Mrs. Proudfoot is a mother who was for years a 
practical kindergartner. She, therefore, strongly 

(.21) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

advocates professional motherhood. She discusses 
marriage, the family and womanhood essentially 
from the point of view of the mother. 

Bits of Talk About Home Matters. By 

Helen Hunt Jackson. 

Worth reading through, but especially the three 
chapters on the "Inhumanities of Parents." The 
chapter on " Breaking the Will " is perhaps the most 
noted. Those on "The Awkward Age," "A Day 
with a Courteous Mother " and " Boys Not Allowed " 
are of great practical value as well as of high literary 
quality. 

Mental Development of the Child. By w. 

Preyer. 

Preyer was one of the earliest scientific students of 
the child. He makes imitation the first sure sign of 
the development of the will. Notwithstanding his 
scientific point of view, he believes that the observa- 
tion of mental development in the earliest years 
naturally falls to a mother, and his book is written 
mainly with the object of initiating mothers into 
the complicated science of psychogenesis. 

The Physical Nature of the Child. By Stuart 

H. Rowe. 

While many other good books on child study include 
discussion of the child's physical nature, this dock 
confines itself to it. The book revolves about the 
two basal facts that action is the first law of growth, 
and that individuals vary in their mental and physical 
capabilities. An untechnical treatise, valuable alike 
to parents, teachers and those in charge of orphan- 
ages and other charities for children. 

(122) 



A Course in Child Study 

The Study of Children. By Francis Warner. 
Dr. Warner examined one hundred thousand English 
school children on a fixed plan. He advocates keep- 
ing the psychological methods distinct from the 
physical. In the physical study of brain action and 
bodily conditions we should describe simply what we 
see, and employ no terms implying results of con- 
sciousness and states of feeling. Popularly valuable, 
as teaching how to observe a child, what to look for, 
the points to look at, and what may be seen. Direc- 
tions for observing and describing are explicit. 
Descriptions of types are given. The chapter on 
adolescence is important. 

The Nervous System of the Child. By 

Francis Warner. 

Especially noteworthy are the ten general characters 
of brain action. The book is largely hygienic in 
purport, from the indications of fatigue or brain 
defect all the way to the making of a bill of fare. 
The book is mainly for teachers, though not exclu- 
sively so. 

The Development of the Child. By Nathan 

Oppenheim. 

The keynote of this book may be said to be nutri- 
tion, in the large sense. The first two chapters are 
a valuable professional demonstration of the import- 
ant fact that the child is not an "adult in small." 
It is an arraignment of those methods which force 
on the undeveloped organism the things which belong 
to adulthood, from the medical expert's point of 



(123) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 
The Story of a Sand Pile. By G. Stanley 

Hall. 

An exceedingly valuable little brochure by the lead- 
ing American exponent of scientific child study. It 
gives an account of the way in which some boys at 
play in a large sand pile worked out life problems. 
Brimful of vital suggestion. 

How John and I Brought up the Child. 

By Elizabeth Grinnell. 

A very suggestive record of the training of a child 
to manhood. Written in a frank, racy, vivacious, 
winning way. It shows both the discrimination and 
the mistakes of parents, not through abstract dis- 
cussions but in a concrete form. 

Your Little Brother James. By Caroline H. 

Pemberton. 

A story, founded on fact, of the rescue of a child 
from vicious surroundings. Written with rare artis- 
tic power, it demonstrates the insignificance of hered- 
ity in the formation of character. 

The Story of a Child. By Pierre Loti. 

Among all books of personal reminiscence of child- 
hood this may be said to stand alone. Loti has the 
power of taking his original childish point of view 
in a very wonderful degree. This reminiscence car- 
ries him from his earliest recollections, about his 
third year, up to his fifteenth. It is often pathetic 
and always subtle and exquisite. 

(124) 



Twenty-Five Reading Courses 



No. i— PROBLEMS IN MODERN DEMOCRACY 

Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this 
course are ex-President Cleveland; Woodrow Wilson, Professor 
of Politics, Princeton University ; Henry J. Ford, author of Rise 
and Growth of American Politics; and Henry D. Lloyd, author 
of Neivest England. The books for the course are selected 
by Mr. Cleveland. 

No. 2— MODERN MASTERS OF MUSIC 

Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this 
course are Reginald de Koven, Dr. W. S. B. Mathews, editor of 
Music ; James G. Huneker, editor of Musical Courier ; Henry 
E. Krehbiel, musical critic New York Tribune; and Gustave 
Kobbe", author of Wagner's Life and Works. The most attrac- 
tive reading course ever offered to lovers of music. 

No. 3— RAMBLINGS AMONG ART CENTRES 

Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this 
course are F. Hopkinson Smith, Dr. John C. Van Dyke, Dr. 
John La Farge, President of the Society of American Artists ; 
Kenyon Cox and Dr. Russell Sturgis. The handbook is 
attractively illustrated. Mr. Smith and Dr. Van Dyke are 
responsible for selecting the books to be read. 

No. 4— AMERICAN VACATIONS IN EUROPE 

This course is the next best thing to going abroad oneself. 
Among the contributors to the handbook are Frank R. Stockton, 
Jeannette L. Gilder, editor of The Critic; Mrs. Schuyler Crown- 
mshield and George Ade. The handbook has a fine portrait 
frontispiece. 

No. 5— A STUDY OF SIX NEW ENGLAND CLASSICS 

The books for this course are selected by Dr. Edward 
Everett Hale. Among the contributors to the handbook are 
Dr. Hale, Julian Hawthorne, Mrs. James T. Fields and Dr. 
Edward Waldo Emerson. Dr. Emerson is a son of Ralph Waldo 
Emerson. This is one of the most attractive courses in the 
entire series. 

No. 6- SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLISH KINGS 

The plays are selected for this course by H. Beerbohm 
Tree, the well-known English actor, and the books to be read 
in connection with the plays are selected by Sir Henry 

(•27) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



Irving. Among the other contributors to the handbook are Prof. 
Edward Dowden, acknowledged the greatest Shakespearean 
scholar of Great Britain, Dr. Hiram Corson, of Cornell Univer- 
sity; Dr. William J. Rolfe and Dr. Hamilton W. Mabie. The 
handbook is very attractively illustrated. 



No. 7— CHARLES DICKENS: HIS LIFE AND WORK 

Among the contributors to the delightful handbook accompany- 
ing this course are George W. Cable, the well-known novelist; 
Irving Bacheller, author of Eden Ho/den; Andrew Lang, the 
distinguished English writer ; Amelia E. Barr, the novelist ; and 
James L. Hughes, author of Dickens as an Educator. The 
books to be read are selected by Mr. Cable and Mr. 
Bacheller. The handbook is beautifully illustrated. 

No. 8— CHILD STUDY FOR MOTHERS AND TEACHERS 

Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this 
course are Margaret E. Sangster, Nora Archibald Smith, Anne 
Emilie Poulson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Lucy Wheelock 
and Kate Gannett Wells. Mrs. Sangster selects the books to be 
read. 

No. 9— INDUSTRIAL QUESTIONS OF THE DAY 

The following distinguished writers on economic problems 
contribute to the handbook accompanying this course : Presi- 
dent Jacob Gould Schurman, of Cornell University ; Jeremiah 
Whipple Jenks, Professor of Political Science, Cornell University ; 
Richard Theodore Ely, Director of the School of Economics, 
Political Science and History, University of Wisconsin ; Sidney 
Webb, Lecturer London School of Economics and Political 
Science, Member London County Council ; and Carroll Davidson 
Wright, United States Commissioner of Labor. 

No. io— FLORENCE IN ART AND LITERATURE 

Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this 
course are William Dean Howells, Dr. Russell Sturgis, Frank 
Preston Stearns, author of Midsummer of Italian Art, Life oj 
Tintoretto, etc.; Dr. William Henry Goodyear, Curator Fine Arts 
Museum of Brooklyn Institute; and Lewis Frederick Pilcher, 
Professor of Art, Vassar College. The handbook has some 
attractive illustrations. 

No. ii— STUDIES OF EUROPEAN GOVERNMENTS 

The books have been selected specially for this course by the 
Rt. Hon. James Bryce, of the English House of Commons, and 
the Hon. Andrew D. White, United States Ambassador to Ger- 



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many. Among the other contributors to the handbook are Jesse 
Macy, Professor of Constitutional History and Political Science, 
Iowa College; and John William Burgess, Professor of Political 
Science and Constitutional Law, and Dean of the Faculty of 
Political Science, Columbia University. 

No. 12— FAMOUS WOMEN OF THE RENAISSANCE 

Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this 
course are Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Margaret Deland 
and Charlotte Brewster Jordan. The handbook has several 
very interesting illustrations. 

No. 13— THE MODERN CITY AND ITS PROBLEMS 

Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this 
course are Dr. Frederic W. Speirs ; Dr. Albert Shaw, editor 
of The Review of Reviews ; Bird S. Coler, Comptroller of the 
City of New York, author of Municipal Government; and Charles 
J. Bonaparte, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the 
National Municipal League. The books are selected by Dr. 
Speirs. 

No. 14— STUDIES IN APPLIED ELECTRICITY 

This is without exception the most attractive and the most 
helpful reading course ever offered to students of electricity. 
Thomas A. Edison selects the books specially for these studies. 
Among the other contributors to the handbook are Dr. Edwin 
J. Houston, Dr. Elihu Thomson, Carl Hering, Ex-President of 
the American Institute of Electrical Engineers ; and Arthur V. 
Abbott, Chief Engineer of the Chicago Telephone Company. 

No. 15— FIVE WEEKS' STUDY OF ASTRONOMY 

Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this 
course are Charles A. Young, Professor of Astronomy, Prince- 
ton University ; Sir Robert S. Ball, Professor of Astronomy, 
Cambridge University, and Director of Cambridge Observa- 
tory, England; Camille Flammarion, founder of the As- 
tronomical Society of France, and author of Marvels of the 
Heavens, Astronomy, etc.; George C. Comstock, Director of 
Washburn Observatory, University of Wisconsin ; and Harold 
Jacoby, Professor of Astronomy, Columbia University. The 
study programme includes contributions from the most famous 
astronomers of England and France. 

No. 16— RECENT ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

Lovers of the best modern dramas will find much pleasure in 
these studies. Among the contributors to the handbook are 
Brander Matthews, Professor of Literature, Columbia University; 

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Dr. William Winter, Dramatic Critic for the New York Tribune ; 
Dr. Harry Thurston Peck, Editor of The Bookman; Louise 
Chandler Moulton ; and Norman Hapgood, the well-known 
writer of dramatic criticism. The handbook has some interest- 
ing illustrations. 

No. 17— STUDIES IN CURRENT RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 

The books are chosen for the course by Dr. Lyman Abbott 
and Dr. Washington Gladden. Among the contributors to 
the handbook are Dr. Samuel D. McConnell, Rector of Holy 
Trinity Church, Brooklyn ; President William DeWitt Hyde, of 
Bowdoin College ; Dr. Amory H. Bradford, Editor of The 
Outlook ; Dr. Henry Collin Minton, of San Francisco Theological 
Seminary, late Moderator of the Presbyterian General Assembly ; 
Dr. H. W. Thomas, Pastor of the People's Church, Chicago; 
and Dr. Theodore T. Munger, Pastor of the United Congrega- 
tional Church, New Haven. For clergymen and laymen who 
wish to stimulate the growth of a theology which is in harmony 
with the best thought of the time we recommend this handbook 
and this reading course. 

No. 18— THE GREATER VICTORIAN POETS 

The books are selected for this course by Thomas Bailey 
Aldrich. Among the other contributors to the handbook are 
Thomas R. Lounsbury, Professor of English, Yale University; 
Dr. T. M. Parrott, of Princeton University ; and Marie Ada Moli- 
neux, author of The Phrase Book of Browning. 

No. 19— OUT-OF-DOOR AMERICANS 

Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this 
course are John Burroughs, Ernest Seton-Thompson, President 
David Starr Jordan, of the Leland Stanford Junior University ; 
Ernest Ingersoll and Hamlin Garland. Lovers of nature will 
find delight in the outlines and recommendations of this course. 

No. 20— THE WORLD'S GREAT WOMAN NOVELISTS 

Mrs. Humphry Ward, the well-known English novelist, is the 
first contributor to the handbook accompanying this course. 
The other contributors are Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, Mary 
E. Wilkins, Agnes Repplier, Katherine Lee Bates, Professor of 
English, Wellesley College; and Oscar Fay Adams. The hand- 
book contains some interesting illustrations. 

No. 21— AMERICAN FOUNDATION HISTORY 

Hon. Henry Cabot Lodge selects the books for this course. 
Among the other contributors are Albert Bushnell Hart, Pro- 
fessor of American History, Harvard University ; John Bach 

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McMaster, Professor of American History, University of Penn- 
sylvania ; Reuben Gold Thwaites, Secretary of the State Histori- 
cal Society of Wisconsin, author of The Colonies ; Paul Leicester 
Ford, author of Janice Meredith; and Andrew Cunningham 
McLaughlin, Professor of American History, University of 
Michigan. 

No. 22— STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERARY LIFE 

Professor Barrett Wendell and Professor Lewis E. Gates, of 
Harvard, and Dr. Horace E. Scudder, late editor of The Atlantic 
Monthly, contribute to the handbook accompanying this course. 
For a brief stimulative and instructive course in American litera- 
ture nothing better could possibly be offered. 

No. 23— STUDIES IN RECENT FRENCH FICTION 

Alcee Fortier, Professor of Romance Languages, Tulane 
University of Louisiana, has chosen the books for this reading 
course. Among the contributors to the handbook are the three 
distinguished French writers, Edouard Rod, Ferdinand Bru- 
netiere and Paul Bourget, and the notable American critic, 
Dr. Benjamin W. Wells, author of Modern French Literature and 
A Century of French Literature. 

No. 24— THE ENGLISH BIBLE : HOW WE GOT IT 

The contributors to this course include President William R 
Harper, of the University of Chicago ; John Franklin Genung, 
Professor of Rhetoric, Amherst College ; William Newton Clarke, 
Professor of Christian Theology, Colgate University; and Richard 
G. Moulton, Professor of English Literature, University of 
Chicago. The handbook is a very interesting and instructive 
volume in itself. 

No. 25— THE MECHANISM OF 

PRESENT DAY COMMERCE 

In Preparation. The books are selected by the Hon. Lyman 
J. Gage, Secretary of the Treasury. 



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